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THE LAST FRONTIER 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

THE WHITE MAN'S WAR 
FOR CIVILISATION IN AFRICA 



BY 

E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S. 

;l 
LATE OF THE AMERICAN CONSULAR SERVICE IN EGYPT 



WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS 
AND MAP 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1912 



,\ 






Copyright, 1912, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published November, 191 2 




CLA328467 



Wo 

MY CHEERFUL, UNCOMPLAINING 

AND COURAGEOUS COMRADE ON THE 

LONG AFRICAN TRAIL 

MY WIFE 



FOREWORD 

• 
The unknown lands are almost all discovered. The 

work of the explorer and the pioneer is nearly finished, 
and ere long their stern and hardy figures will have 
passed from the world's stage, never to return. In the 
Argentine, in Mexico, and in Alaska store clothes and 
stiff hats are replacing corduroys and sombreros; the 
pack-mule is giving way to the motor-car. The earth 
has but one more great prize with which to lure the 
avaricious and the adventurous: Africa — mysterious, 
opulent, alluring — ^beckons and calls. 

The conditions which exist in Africa to-day closely 
parallel those which were to be found, within the mem- 
ory of many of us, beyond the Mississippi. In North 
Africa the French are pushing their railways across the 
desert in the face of Arab opposition, just as we pushed 
our railways across the desert in the face of Indian op- 
position forty years ago. As an El Dorado the Trans- 
vaal has taken the place held by Australia, and Cali- 
fornia, and the Yukon, in their turn. The grazing lands 
of Morocco and the grain lands of Rhodesia will prove 
formidable rivals to those of our own West in a much- 
nearer future than most of us suppose. French and 
British well-drillers are giving modern versions of the 
miracle of Moses in the Sahara and the Sudan and con- 
verting worthless deserts into rich domains thereby. 

vii 



FOREWORD 

The story of the conquest of a continent by these 
men with levels and transits, drills and dynamite, 
ploughs and spades, forms a chronicle of courage, dar- 
ing, resource, and tenacity unsurpassed in history. They 
are no idlers, these pioneers of the desert, the jungle, 
and the veldt; they live with danger and hardship for 
their daily mates; they die with their boots on from 
snake-bite or sleeping-sickness or Somali spear; and 
remember, please, they are making new markets and 
new playgrounds for you and me. Morocco, Algeria, 
Tripolitania, Equatoria, Rhodesia, the Sahara, the 
Sudan, the Congo, the Rand, and the Zambezi . . . 
with your permission I will take you to them all, and you 
shall see, as though with your own eyes, those strange 
and far-off places which mark the line of the Last Fron- 
tier, where the white-helmeted pioneers are fighting the 
battles and solving the problems of civilisation. 

E. Alexander Powell. 



VUl 



AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

For assistance in the preparation of this book I am 
grateful to many people. To the editors of Collier's, 
The Outlook, The Review of Reviews, The Independent, 
The Metropolitan, Travel, and Scribner^s my thanks are 
due for their permission to use such portions of this 
volume as originally appeared in their magazines in the 
form of articles. I also desire to acknowledge my 
indebtedness to the Right Hon. James Bryce, O.M., for 
permission to avail myself of certain data contained in 
his admirable work on South Africa; to Charles K. 
Field, Esq., editor of The Sunset Magazine, for the title 
and introductory lines to Chapter V; to the Hon. F. C. 
Penfield, former American Diplomatic Agent in Egypt, 
from whose clear and comprehensive "Present-Day 
Egypt" I have drawn portions of my account of the 
complex administration of the Nile country; to J. Scott 
Keltic, LL.D., F.R.G.S., author of "The Partition of 
Africa" and editor of "The Statesman's Year-Book," 
for much valuable information obtained from those 
volumes; and to Miss Isabel Savory, A. Sylva White, 
Esq., S. H. Leeder, Esq., C. W. Furlong, Esq., and 
Francis Miltoun, Esq., for suggestions derived from their 
writings on African subjects. To the American diplo- 
matic and consular ofi&cials in Africa, and to mission- 
aries of many creeds and denominations, I am indebted 

ix 



AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

for innumerable kindnesses and much valuable informa- 
tion. At consulate and mission station alike, from 
Cape Bon to Table Bay, I found the latch-string always 
out and an extra chair at the table. I likewise take 
this opportunity of expressing my appreciation of the 
courtesies shown me by H. H. Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive 
of Egypt; H. R. H. Prince George of Greece, former 
High Commissioner in Crete; H. H. Ali bin Hamoud 
bin Mohammed, ex-Sultan of Zanzibar; H. E. the 
French Minister of the Colonies; H. E. the Belgian 
Minister of the Colonies; Sir Thomas CulHnan of the 
Premier Diamond Mine, Pretoria; and to the officers 
of the Imperial German East Africa Railways; the 
Beira, Mashonaland and Rhodesian Railways; and the 
British South Africa Company. 

E. A. P. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Foreword vii 

An Acknowledgment ix 

CHAPTER 

I. The Third Empire i 

11. The Passing of the Peacock's Tail. ... 27 

III. Sirens of the Sands 56 

IV. The Italian "^ White Man's Burden" ... 80 
V. The Land of Before- and- After 108 

VI. In Zanzibar 143 

VII. The Spiked Helmet in Africa 165 

VIII. "All Aboard for Cape Town!" 190 

IX. The Last Stand of the Pioneer 205 

X. The Country of Big Things 223 

XL The Forgotten Isles 248 

Index 287 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

A Sandstorm Passing Over Khartoum Frontispiece ^ 

FACING PAGE 

Tunis, the Most Beautiful City in Africa lo v' 

"Through Dim Bazaars where Turbaned Shopkeepers Squat 

Patiently in their Doorways" . i6 ^^ 

The Desert Patrol i8 ^' 

A Masked Tuareg Riding a Mehari, or Racing Camel ... 20 v- 

A Rough Rider of the Desert 24 w^ 

The Troglodyte Town of Medenine, Southern Tunisia ... 26 ^ 

The Great Prayer in the Desert 30 ^ 

Some of France's New African Subjects 40 v' 

Some Sirens of the Sands 58 -^ 

Ouled-Naiil Dancing in the Desert 62 v^ 

The Marriage Ordeal of a Kabyle Bride 66 "^ 

A Mauresque of Tunisia 68 ^ 

Jewish Women in the Cemetery of Tunis 70 i 

Mauresque Women in Arab Cemetery 72 i 

An Arab Wedding in the Desert 76 t'-^ 

An Arab Bride Going to Her Husband 78 

Arabs of the Tripolitanian Hinterland 84 1/' 

Sunrise on the Great Sands ............ 86 

The Suks of Tripoli ..,,..,,. 90 '^'^ 

xiii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Work and Play in Black Man's Africa no v 

The Saviour of the Sudan and Some of Those he Saved . . ii8 "^ 

Strange People from Innermost Africa 128 ^ 

The British Drill-sergeant's Work in the Sudan 136 \/ 

The Land of Before-and- After 138 "^ 

A Smiling Damsel of Kordofan 140 |/ 

The Gateway to East Africa 146 

Masai Fighting-men from the Lake Region of Central Africa 150 *^ 

"Two Little Girls from School are We" 154^/ 

Arab Women of Zanzibar 156 v^ 

One of England's Puppet Potentates and the Men Who Pull 

the Strings 160 V 

African Standards of B eauty D iff er Consider ably from Our Own 1821/ 

On the Terrible East Coast 184 

The Hand of the War Lord in German Africa 186 *' 

Railroading through a Jungle 188 

Beira, a Place that the Lord Forgot 208 - 

The Old Life and the New in Rhodesia 212 

Life on the Last Frontier 214 

Bulawayo, Matabeleland 216 

More Work for the Pioneer 218 

The Victoria Falls of the Zambezi . . . . . . . . . . 220 i 

Women of Black Man's Africa 230 {/ 

In the Country of Big Things 242 i-^ 

The Traveller's Tree of the Seychelles 252 

xiv 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Islands of Exile 254 "^ 

Ex-King Prempeh of Ashantee and His Cannibal Court . . 256 ^ 

Where Cocoanuts are as Common as Apples are at Home . . 258 ^^ 

The Prison Place of a Great Emperor 268 ^ 



Map of Africa, Showing Railways and Spheres of Influence 

At end, oj volume ^^ 



VJ 



THE LAST FRONTIER 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

CHAPTER I 

THE THIRD EMPIRE 

WE have witnessed one of the most remarkable 
episodes in the history of the world. In less 
than a generation we have seen the French dream of an 
African empire stretching without interruption from 
the Mediterranean to the Congo literally fulfilled. 
French imperialism did not end, as the historians 
would have you believe, on that September day in 
1870 when the third Napoleon lost his liberty and his 
throne at Sedan. The echoes of the Commune had 
scarcely died away before the French empire-builders 
were again at work, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceanica, 
founding on every seaboard of the world a new and 
greater France. In the twoscore years that have 
elapsed since France's annee terrible her neglected and 
scattered colonies have been expanded into a third 
empire — an empire oversea. She has had her revenge 
for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by forestalling Teutonic 
colonial ambition in every quarter of the globe: in 
China, in Australasia, in Equatoria, and in Morocco the 
advance of the German vorlopers has been halted by the 
harsh "Qwi vive?" of the French videttes. 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Though thirty centuries have elapsed since Phoe- 
nicia first began to nibble at the continent, it was not 
until 1884 that the mad rush began which ended in 
Africa's being apportioned among themselves by half a 
dozen European nations with as little scruple as a gang 
of boys would divide a stolen pie. This stealing of a 
continent, lock, stock, and barrel, is one of the most 
astounding performances in history. France emerged 
from the scramble with a larger slice of territory than 
any other power, a territory which she has so steadily 
and systematically expanded and consolidated that to- 
day her sphere of influence extends over forty-five per 
cent of the land area and twenty-four per cent of the popula- 
tion of Africa. 

So silently, swiftly, and unobtrusively have the 
French empire-builders worked that even those of us 
who pride ourselves on keeping abreast of the march 
of civilisation are fairly amazed when we trace on the 
map the distances to which they have pushed the Re- 
public's African frontiers. Did you happen to know that 
the fugitive from justice who turns the nose of his camel 
southward from Algiers must ride as far as from Mil- 
waukee to the City of Mexico before he can pass be- 
yond the shadow of the tricolour and the arm of the 
French law? Were you aware that if you start from 
the easternmost boundary of the French Sudan you 
will have to cover a distance equal to that from Buffalo 
to San Francisco before you can hear the Atlantic 
rollers booming against the break-water at Dakar? 
It is, indeed, not the slightest exaggeration to say that 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

French influence is to-day predominant over all that 
expanse of the Dark Continent lying west of the Nile 
basin and north of the Congo — a territory one and a half 
times the size of the United States — thus forming the 
only continuous empire in Africa, with ports on every 
seaboard of the continent. 

With the exception of the negro republic of Liberia 
(on whose frontiers, by the way, France is steadily 
and systematically encroaching), the little patches of 
British and Spanish possessions on the West Coast, and 
the German colonies of Kamerun and Togoland, France 
has unostentatiously brought under her control that 
enormous tract of African soil which stretches from the 
banks of the Congo to the shores of the Mediterranean, 
and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Valley of the Nile. 
Algeria has been French for three-quarters of a century, 
being regarded, indeed, as a part of France and not a 
colony at all. Though the Bey of Tunis still holds per- 
functory audiences in his Palace of the Bardo, it is from 
the French Residency that the protectorate is really 
ruled. Though Tripolitania has passed under Italian 
dominion, it is French and not Italian influence which is 
recognised by the unsubjugated tribesmen of the hinter- 
land. And now, after years of intrigue and machina- 
tions, which twice have brought her to the brink of war, 
France, by one of the most remarkable diplomatic vic- 
tories of our time, has won the last of the world's great 
territorial prizes and has set the capstone on her co- 
lonial edifice by adding the empire of Morocco — under 
the guise of a protectorate — to her oversea domain. 

3 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

On the West Coast the tricolour floats over the 
colonies of Senegal, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, 
Dahomey, Upper Senegal-Niger, and Mauritania (the 
last named a newly organised colony formed from por- 
tions of the Moroccan hinterland), the combined area 
of these possessions alone being about equal to that of 
European Russia. 

From the Congo northward to the confines of the 
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan stretches the great colony of 
French Equatorial Africa — formerly known as the French 
Congo — the acquirement of which by Savorgnan de 
Brazza, counterchecked the ambitious plans of Stanley 
and his patron, King Leopold, thus forming one of the 
most dramatic incidents in the scramble for Africa. 
Though potentially the most valuable of the French 
West African possessions, being enormously rich in 
both jungle and mineral products, notably rubber, 
ivory, and copper, France has taken surprisingly little 
interest in this colony's development, and, as a result, 
it has been permitted to fall into a state of almost piti- 
ful neglect. There are two causes for the backwardness 
of French Equatorial Africa: first, its atrocious climate, 
the whole territory being a breeding-ground for small- 
pox, blood diseases, tropical fevers in their most virulent 
forms, and, worst of all, the terrible sleeping-sickness; 
second, the almost total lack of easy means of com- 
munication, the back door through the Belgian Congo 
being the only direct means of access to the greater part 
of the colony, which was virtually cut in half by the 
broad area lying between the southern boundary of 

4 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

Kamerun and the equator and extending eastward 
from the coast to the Ubangi River, which France ceded 
to Germany in 191 1 as a quid pro quo for being permitted 
a free hand in Morocco, and which has been renamed 
"New Kamerun. " Though the economic development 
of this region must prove, under any circumstances, a 
difficult, dangerous, and discouraging task, it can be ac- 
complished if the government will divert its attention 
from its projects in North Africa long enough to make 
Libreville a decent port, to provide adequate steamer 
services on the great rivers that intersect the colony, 
and to link up those rivers with each other and with the 
coast by a system of railways. 

Lying on the northern frontier of French Equatorial 
Africa, and separating it from the Sahara, is the great 
Central African state of Kanem, with its organised 
native government, its important commerce, and its 
considerably developed civilisation, which was com- 
pletely subjugated by France in 1903, Wadai, its power- 
ful neighbour to the east, accepting a French protector- 
ate in the same year. In the centre of this ring of 
colonies lie the million and a half square miles of the 
French Sahara, which the experiments of the French 
engineers have proved to be as capable of irrigation 
and cultivation as the one-time deserts of our own 
Southwest. Off the other side of the continent is the 
great colony of Madagascar, the second largest island 
in the world, in itself considerably larger than the 
mother country; while the French Somali Coast forms 
the sole gateway to Abyssinia and divides with the 

5 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

British colony of Aden the control of the southern en- 
trance to the Red Sea. Everything considered, his- 
tory can show few parallels to this marvellous colonial 
expansion, begun while France was still suffering from 
the effects of the disastrous Prussian War, and quietly 
carried on under the very eyes of greedy and jealous 
neighbours. 

The territorial ambitions of most countries have 
been blazoned to the world by many wars. It took Eng- 
land two disastrous campaigns to win South Africa and 
two more to conquer the Sudan; Russia learned the 
same lesson in Manchuria at even a more terrible cost; 
while Italy's insecure foothold on the Red Sea shore was 
purchased by the annihilation of an army. Where 
other nations have won their colonial possessions by 
arms, France has won hers by adrisjitness. Always her 
policy has been one of pacific penetration. Trace the 
history of her African expansion and you will find no 
Majuba Hill, no Omdurman, no Adowa, no Modder 
River. Time and time again the accompHshments of 
her small and unheralded expeditions have proved 
that more territory can be won by beads and brass wire 
than by rifles and machine-guns. 

Not long ago I asked the governor-general of Alge- 
ria what he considered the most important factors in 
the remarkable spread of French influence and civilisa- 
tion in North Africa, and he answered, "PubHc schools, 
the American phonograph, and the American sewing- 
machine." The most casual traveller cannot but be 
impressed by the thoroughness with which France has 

6 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

gone into the schoolmaster business in her African 
dominions. She believes that the best way to civilise 
native races is by training their minds, and she does not 
leave so important a work to the missionaries, either. 
In Algiers there is a government university with nearly 
two thousand students and a faculty of one hundred 
professors, while in more than eighteen hundred second- 
ary, primary, and infant schools the youth of Algeria, 
irrespective of whether they believe in Christ, in 
Abraham, or in Mohammed, are being taught how to 
become decent and patriotic citizens of France. In 
Tunisia alone there are something over fifteen hundred 
educational institutions; all down the fever-stricken 
West Coast, under the palm-thatched roofs of Mada- 
gascar and the crackling tin ones of Equatoria, millions 
of dusky youngsters are being taught by Gallic school- 
masters that p-a-t-r-i-e spells "France," and the mean- 
ing of "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.''^ To these patient, 
plodding, persevering men, whether they wear the white 
linen of the civil service or the sombre cassocks of the 
religious orders, I lift my hat in respect and admiration, 
for they are the real pioneers of progress. If I had my 
way, the scarlet ribbon of the Legion would be in the 
button-hole of every one of them. We too may claim 
a share in this work of civilisation, for I have seen a 
band of savage Arab raiders, their fierce hawk-faces 
lighted up by the dung-fed camp-fire, held spellbound 
by the strains of a Yankee phonograph; and I have seen 
the garments of a tribal chieftain of Central Africa be- 
ing fashioned on an American sewing-machine. 

7 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

"When the Enghsh occupy a country," runs a say- 
ing which they have in Africa, "the first thing they 
build is a custom-house; the first thing the Germans 
build is a barracks; but the first thing the French 
build is a railway." Nothing, indeed, is more signifi- 
cant of the civilising work done by the French in these 
almost unknown lands than the means of communica- 
tion, there being in operation to-day in French Africa 
six thousand miles of railway, twenty-five thousand 
miles of telegraph, and ten thousand miles of telephone. 
Think of being able to buy a return ticket from Paris 
to Timbuktu; of telegraphing Christmas greetings to 
your family in Tarrytown or Back Bay or Bryn Mawr 
from the shores of Lake Tchad; or of sitting in the 
American consulate at Tamatave and chatting with a 
friend in Antanarivo, three hundred miles away. Why, 
only the other day the Sultan of Morocco, at Fez, sent 
birthday congratulations to the President of France, at 
Paris, by wireless. 

To-day one can travel on an admirably ballasted 
road-bed, in an electric-lighted sleeping-car, with hot 
and cold running water in your compartment, and with 
a dining-car ahead, along that entire stretch of the Bar- 
bary Coast lying between the Moroccan and Tripohta- 
nian frontiers, which, within the memory of our fathers, 
was the most notorious pirate stronghold in the world. 
A strategic line has been built six hundred miles south- 
ward from the coast city of Oran to Colomb-Bechar, in 
the Sahara, with Timbuktu as its eventual destination, 
and, now that the long-standing Moroccan controversy 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

has been settled for good and all, another railway is 
already being pushed forward from Ujda, on the Alge- 
rian-Moroccan border, and in another year or two the 
shriek of the locomotive will be heard under the walls 
of Fez the Forbidden. From Constantine, in Algeria, 
another line of jails is crawHng southward via Biskra 
into the Sahara, with Lake Tchad as its objective, thus 
opening up to European commerce the great protected 
states of Kanem and Wadai. From Dakar, on the coast 
of Senegal, a combined rail and river service is in opera- 
tion to the Great Bend of the Niger, so that one can now 
go to the mysterious city of Timbuktu by train and river 
steamer, in considerable comfort and under the protec- 
tion of the French flag all the way. In Dahomey, 
within the memory of all of us a notorious cannibal 
kingdom, a railway is under construction to Nikki, four 
hundred miles into the steaming jungle; from Ko- 
nakry, the capital of French Guinea, a line has just 
been opened to Kourassa, three hundred and fifty miles 
from anywhere; while even the fever-stricken, voodoo- 
worshipping Ivory Coast boasts two hundred miles or 
so of well-built line with its rail-head already half-way 
from the coast to Jimini. From Tamatave, the chief 
seaport of Madagascar, you can go by rail to the capital, 
Antanarivo, three hundred miles up into the mountains, 
and, if you wish to continue across the island, govern- 
ment motor-cars will run you down, over roads that 
would make the Glidden tourists envious, to Majunga, 
on the other side. From Djibouti, the capital of the 
French Somali Coast, another railway has been pushed 

9 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

as far up-country as Dire-Dawah, in Menelik's domin- 
ions (fare sixty dollars for the round trip of two hundred 
and fifty miles), thus diverting the lucrative trade of 
Abyssinia from the British Sudan to the French marts 
in SomaHland. 

France has more good harbours on the coasts of 
Africa than all the other nations put together. Algiers, 
with one of the finest roadsteads in the world, is now 
the most important coaling-station in the Mediterranean 
and a port of call for nearly all of the lines plying be- 
tween America and the Near East; by the construction 
of a great ship-canal the French engineers have made 
Tunis directly accessible to ocean-going vessels, thus 
restoring the maritime importance of Carthage to her 
successor; with Tangier under French control, a naval 
base will doubtless eventually be constructed there 
which will rival Toulon and will divide with Gibraltar 
the control of the entrance to the Mediterranean. With 
its entire western portion dominated by the great French 
ports of Villefranche, Toulon, Ajaccio, Marseilles, Oran, 
Algiers, and Bizerta, the Mediterranean is well on the 
road to becoming, as Napoleon once prophesied, a 
French lake. 

But, though good harbours are taken rather as a 
matter of course in the Mediterranean, one hardly ex- 
pects to find them on the reef-bordered West Coast, 
which is pounded by a ceaseless and merciless surf. 
At all of the British, German, Spanish, and Portuguese 
ports in West Africa, save one, you are lowered from 
the steamer's heaving deck into a dancing surf -boat by 

lO 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

means of a contrivance called the "mammy chair," and 
are taken ashore by a score of ebony giants who ply 
their trident-shaped paddles madly in their desperate 
efforts to prevent your being capsized. Alternately 
scorched by the sun and soaked by the waves, you are 
landed, about three times out of four, on a beach as 
hot as though of molten brass. The fourth time, how- 
ever, your Kroo boys are not quite quick enough to 
escape the crest of one of those mighty combers — and 
you can thank your lucky stars if you get ashore at all. 
This is the method by which every passenger and every 
bale of merchandise is landed on the West Coast and 
it is very dangerous and unpleasant and costly. But 
when you come to the French port of Dakar, instead of 
being dangled between sea and sky in a bo's'n's chair 
and dropped sprawling into the bottom of a pitching 
surf-boat, and being paddled frantically ashore by a 
crew of perspiring negroes, you lounge in a cane chair 
on an awning-covered deck while your vessel steams 
grandly in, straight alongside a concrete wharf which 
would do credit to the Hudson River, and a steam 
crane dips down into the hold and lifts the cargo out, 
a dozen tons at a time, and loads it on a waiting train 
to be transported into the heart of Africa, and as you 
lean over the rail, marvelHng at the modernity and effi- 
ciency which characterise everything in sight, you won- 
der if you are really in the Dark Continent, or if you 
are back in America again. 

But if the French harbours are amazingly good, the 
French vessels which drop anchor in them are, for the 

II 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

most part, amazingly bad. The Messageries Mari- 
times, a highly subsidised line which has a virtual mo- 
nopoly of the French colonial passenger trade, and 
which is notorious for its we-don't-care-whether-you- 
Hke-it-or-not attitude, has the worst vessels that I 
know, bar none, and charges the most exorbitant fares. 
If you wish to visit the Somali Coast, or Madagascar, 
or Reunion, you will have to take this line, because there 
is no other, but elsewhere along the coasts of Africa you 
will do well to follow my advice and travel under the 
British or the German flag. 

The struggle of the French colonial army to main- 
tain law and order along the vast reaches of France's 
African frontiers forms one of the most thrilling and 
romantic chapters in the history of colonial expansion. 
Theirs has been a work of tact, rather than of force, for, 
where England, Germany, Italy, and Belgium have used 
the iron hand in deahng with the natives, France, more 
farsighted, has seen the wisdom of hiding it within the 
velvet glove. Always she has conciHated the Moslem. 
She has safeguarded the privacy of his mosques and 
harems; she has encouraged by government subsidies 
his schools and universities; instead of desecrating the 
tombs of his holy men, she has whitewashed them; the 
burnooses of the great tribal and religious chieftains are 
brilliant with French decorations; the native mollahs 
and cadis are utilised as local magistrates in all except 
the gravest cases or those involving a European. To 
attempt to govern a country without those, or against 
those, to whom it belonged, is a blunder of which France 

12 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

has never been guilty. It has been the consistent 
policy of other European nations, on the contrary, 
neither to trust the natives nor to treat them with any 
degree of consideration. Hence the ominous unrest in 
India; hence the ever louder murmur of "Egypt 
for the Egyptians"! hence the refusal of the natives of 
German East Africa to work on German-owned planta- 
tions and their wholesale emigration from that colony; 
hence the fact that no ItaHan official in Eritrea or 
Benadir dares venture outside the town walls unarmed 
and unescorted, nor will in TripoKtania for many years 
to come. I have been assured repeatedly by North 
African sheikhs that, should France become involved in 
a European war, her native soldiery would volunteer 
almost to a man. That England is far from certain 
how her Egyptian and Sudanese troops would behave in 
such a contingency is best proved by the formidable 
British garrisons which she deems it wise to maintain 
in the land of the Valley of the Nile. 

I am but reflecting the opinions of many highly 
placed and intimately informed European officials in 
North Africa when I assert that Germany's repeated in- 
terference with the French programme in Morocco was 
due as much to military as to political reasons, the Ger- 
mans using this means to hinder the expansion of that 
mysterious /orce noire which has long been a bugaboo to 
the War Office authorities in Berlin. Whether this was 
the true reason or not for Germany's attitude in the 
Moroccan business, no one knows better than the Ger- 
man general staff that, in the event of war, the RepubUc 

13 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

would be able to advance a great black army to the 
banks of the Rhine in thirty days — and that she would 
not be deterred by the scruples which prevented her 
utihsing her African soldiery in 1870. It has been re- 
peatedly urged, indeed, that the numerical inferiority 
of the annual French conscription, as compared with 
that of Germany, be made up for by drafting a corps of 
black troops drawn from French West Africa into the 
continental army. France has already recruited very 
close to twenty thousand native troops — ^which is the 
strength of an army corps — in her West African posses- 
sions alone, and as any scheme for drafting it into 
Algeria, so as to enable the French troops stationed 
there to be available elsewhere, would instantly arouse 
the Arab population to revolt, it is highly probable that 
this African army corps would, in case of war, be em- 
ployed on the European continent. Though France's 
African army does not at present number much over 
fifty thousand men — all well drilled, highly disciplined, 
and modernly armed — the French drill-sergeants in 
Africa are not idle and have limitless resources to draw 
from. The population of the negro states under 
French protection runs into many millions, and would 
easily yield twenty per cent of fighting men, while 
the acquisition of Morocco has added the Berbers, 
that strange, warlike, Caucasian race, to the Repubhc's 
fighting line. Nothing pleases the African as an occu- 
pation more than soldiering, his native physique, cour- 
age, and endurance making him, with amazingly little 
training, a first-class fighting man. It is no great won- 

14 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

der, then, that Germany looks askance at the formidable 
army which her rival is building up so quietly but so 
steadily on the other side of the Middle Sea. 

No small part in the winning of North Africa has 
been played by the Foreign Legion — how the name 
smacks of romance ! — that picturesque company of ad- 
venturers, soldiers of fortune, and ne'er-do-weels, ten 
thousand strong, most of whom serve under the French 
flag in preference to serving in their own prisons. In this 
notorious corps the French Government enlists without 
question any physically fit man who applies. It asks 
no questions and expects to be told any number of lies. 
It trains them until they are as hard as nails and as 
tough as rawhide; it works them as a negro teamster 
works a Kentucky mule; it pays them wages which 
would cause a strike among Chinese coolies; and, when 
the necessity arises, it sends them into action with the 
assurance that there will be no French widows to be 
pensioned. So unenviable is the reputation of the 
Legionnaires that even the Algerian desert towns balk 
at their being stationed in the vicinity, for nothing 
from hen-roost to harem is safe from their depreda- 
tions; so they are utilised on the most remote frontiers 
in time of peace and invariably form the advance guard 
in time of war. It is commonly said that when the 
Legion goes into action its officers take the precaution 
of marching in the rear, so as not to be shot in the back, 
but that is probably a libel which the regiment does not 
deserve. Wherever the musketry is crackling along 
France's colonial frontiers, there this Legion of the 

IS 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Damned is to be found, those who wear its uniform be- 
ing, for the most part, bearers of notorious or illustrious 
names who have chosen to fight under an alien flag be- 
cause they are either afraid or ashamed to show them- 
selves under their own. 

Several times each year it is customary for the com- 
mandants of the French posts along the edge of the 
Sahara to organise fantasias in honour of the Arab 
sheikhs of the region, who come in to attend them, fol- 
lowed by great retinues of burnoosed, turbaned, and 
splendidly mounted retainers, with the same enthusiasm 
with which an American countryside turns out to see 
the circus. At one of these affairs, held in southern 
Algeria, I could not but contrast the marked attentions 
paid by the French officials to the native chieftains with 
the cavalier and frequently insolent attitude invaria- 
bly assumed by British officials toward Egyptians of 
all ranks, not even excepting the Khedive. Were a 
French official to affront one of the great Arab sheikhs 
as Lord ELitchener did the Khedive, when he exacted 
an apology from his Highness for presuming to criticise 
the discipHne of the Sudanese troops, he would be 
fortunate indeed if he escaped summary dismissal. 

At the fantasia in question luxuriously furnished 
tents had been erected for the comfort of the native 
guests; a champagne luncheon provided the excuse for 
innumerable protestations of friendship; a series of 
races with money prizes was arranged for the visitors' 
horses; and, before leaving, the sheikhs were presented 
with ornate Saddles, gold-mounted rifles, and, in the 

i6 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

cases of the more important chieftains, with crosses of 
the Legion of Honour. In return for this they wiUingly 
agreed to capture and surrender certain fugitives from 
justice who had fled into the desert ; to warn the more 
lawless of their tribesmen that the plundering of cara- 
vans must cease; to furnish specified quotas of recruits 
for the native cavalry; and to send in for sale to the 
Remount Department a large number of desert-bred 
horses. And, which is the most important of all, they 
go back to their tented homes in the desert immensely 
impressed with the power, the wealth, and the generosity 
of France. 

Not content with these periodic manifestations of 
friendship, the French Government makes it a point oc- 
casionally to invite the native rulers of the lands under 
its control to visit France as the guests of the nation. 
Escorted by French officers who can talk with them in 
their own tongue, these colonial visitors in their out- 
landish costumes are shown the delights of Montmartre 
by night, they are dined by the President of the Re- 
public at the Elysee, they are given the freedom of 
Paris at the Hotel de Ville, and they finally return to 
their own lands the friends and alHes of France for the 
rest of their lives. "It doesn't cost the government 
much," an official of the French Colonial Office once 
remarked to me, a propos of a visit then being paid to 
Paris by the King of Cambodia, "and it tickles the 
niggers. " 

StraggUng down here and there into the desert from 
some of the North African coast towns go the trade 

17 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

routes of the caravans, and it is the protection of these 
trade routes, traversing, as they do, a territory half 
again as large as that of the United States, that is en- 
trusted to the twelve hundred meharistes composing 
France's Saharan forces. By a network of small oasis 
garrisons and desert patrols, recruited from the desert 
tribes and mounted on the tall, swift-trotting camels 
known as mehari, France has made the Saharan trade- 
routes, if not as safe as Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, cer- 
tainly very much safer for the lone traveller than lower 
Clark Street, in Chicago, or the neighbourhood of the 
Paris Holies. It has long been the fashion to hold up 
the Northwest Mounted Police as the model for all 
constabulary forces, just as it has been the fashion to 
extol the EngKsh as the model colonisers, but, taking 
into consideration the fewness of their numbers, the 
vastness of the region which they control, and the char- 
acter of its chmate and its inhabitants, I give the blue 
ribbon to these lean, brown-faced, hard-riding camel- 
men who have carried law and order into the further- 
most corners of the Great Sahara. 

Though comparatively unfertile, the Sahara vastly 
influences the surrounding regions, just as the Atlan- 
tic Ocean influences the countries which border on it. 
Were commerce to be seriously interrupted upon the 
Atlantic, financial hardships would inevitably result 
in the countries on either side. So it is, then, with the 
Sahara, which is, to all intents and purposes, an inland 
ocean. Ever since the caravan of the Queen of Sheba 
brought gifts to King Solomon, ever since Abraham 

i8 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

came riding down from Ur, it has been customary for 
the nomad Arab rulers through whose territories the 
desert trade routes pass to exact heavy tribute from the 
caravan sheikhs, the Bilma trans-Saharan route alone 
being plundered annually to the tune of ten miUion 
francs until the coming of the French camel police. 
Many of these great trade caravans, you will under- 
stand, are literally moving cities, sometimes consisting 
of as many as twelve thousand camels, to say nothing 
of the accompanying horses, donkeys, sheep, and goats. 
To outfit such a caravan often takes a year or more, 
frequently at a cost of more than one million dollars, 
the money being subscribed in varying sums by thou- 
sands of merchants and petty traders dwelling in the 
region whence it starts. It is obvious, therefore, that 
the looting of such a caravan might well spell ruin for 
the people of a whole district; and it is by her successful 
protection of the caravan routes that France has earned 
the gratitude of the peoples of all those regions border- 
ing on the Great Sahara. But the days of the caravan 
trade are numbered, for the telegraph wires which al- 
ready stretch across the desert from the Mediterranean 
coast towns to the French outposts in the Congo, the 
Senegal, and the Sudan, are but forerunners to herald 
the coming of the iron horse. 

France's path of colonial expansion in Africa has 
been remarkably free from obstructions, for, barring the 
Algerian campaign of 1830, and the German-created 
incidents in Morocco, she has acquired her vast domain 
— close on half the total area of the continent — at a 

19 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

surprisingly low cost in money and lives. The only 
time, indeed, when her African ambitions received a 
serious setback was in 1898, at Fashoda (now known as 
Kodok), on the White Nile, when the French explorer, 
Major Marchand, yielded to the peremptory demand 
of Lord Kitchener and hauled down the tricolour which 
he had raised at that remote spot, thus losing to France 
the whole of the Western Sudan and the control of the 
head-waters of the Nile. 

There is an interesting bit of secret diplomatic his- 
tory in this connection. The story has been told me by 
both French and British officials — and there is good 
reason to believe that it is true — that the French Gov- 
ernment had planned, in case Marchand was able to 
hold his position until reinforcements arrived, to divert 
the waters of the White Nile, at a point near its junction 
with the Sobat River, into the Sahara, an imdertaking 
which, owing to the physical characteristics of that 
region, would, so the French engineers claimed, have 
been entirely feasible. France would thus have accom- 
pHshed the twofold purpose of irrigating her desert 
territory and of turning Egypt into a desert by divert- 
ing her only supply of water; for this, remember, was in 
those bitter, jealous days before the Anglo-French en- 
tente. It was, indeed, the intelligence that the Khalifa 
proposed, by doing this very thing, to bring Egypt to 
her knees that caused the second Sudanese expedition 
to be pushed forward so rapidly. (I should add that the 
idea, once so popular in France, of turning the Sahara 
into an inland sea, has been proven impracticable, if not 

20 




A MASKED TUAREG RIDING A MEHARI, OR RACING CAMEL. 

The savage and merciless Tuaregs are to the Sahara what the Apaches were to the American West 

thirty years ago. 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

impossible.) It is safe to say that England's prime rea- 
son for clinging so tenaciously, and at such heavy cost, 
to the arid tract known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is 
to safeguard Egyptian prosperity by keeping control of 
the head-waters of the Nile. To illustrate how com- 
pletely the Nile is the barometer of Egyptian prosperity, 
I might add that the last time I was in Khartoum 
the officials of the Sudanese Irrigation Service com- 
plained to me most bitterly that they were being 
seriously hampered in their work of desert reclamation 
by the restrictions placed upon the quantity of water 
which they were permitted to divert from the Nile, a 
comparatively small diversion from the upper reaches 
of the river causing wide-spread distress among the 
Egyptian agriculturists a thousand miles down-stream. 
Because the map-makers from time beyond reckon- 
ing have seen fit to paint the northern half of the African 
continent a speckled yellow, most of us have been ac- 
customed to look upon this region as an arid, sun-baked, 
worthless desert. But French explorers, French en- 
gineers, and French scientists have proved that it is 
very far from being worthless or past reclamation. 
M. Henri Schirmer, the latest and most careful student 
of its problems, says: "The sterility of the Sahara is 
due neither to the form of the land nor to its nature. 
The alluvium of sand, chalk, and gypsum which covers 
the Algerian Sahara constitutes equally the soil of the 
most fertile plains in the world. What causes the 
misery of one and the wealth of the other is the absence 
or the presence of water." Now, an extensive series 

21 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

of experiments has proven that the Sahara, like the 
Great American Desert, has an ample supply of under- 
ground water, which in many cases has been reached 
at a depth of only forty feet. There is, incidentally, 
hardly a desert where the experiment has been tried, 
whether in Asia, Africa, or America, where water has 
not been found within two thousand feet of the surface. 
Though usually not sufficient for agriculture, enough 
has generally been found to afford a supply for cattle, 
railroads, and mines. Three striking examples of what 
can be accomplished by scientific well-drilling in arid 
lands are the great wells of the Salton Desert, the flow- 
ing wells at Benson, Arizona, and a supply of seven 
hundred thousand gallons of water a day from the deep 
wells on the mesa at El Paso, each of these supplies of 
water being obtained from localities which were super- 
ficially hopelessly dry. 

It should be borne in mind, in any discussion of 
North Africa, that until the early '8o's the Great Ameri- 
can Desert was as primitive, waterless, and sparsely 
settled a region as the Sahara. Its scattered inhabitants 
practised irrigation and agriculture very much as the 
people of southern Algeria and Tunisia do to-day, and, 
like them, they constructed buildings of unburnt brick 
and stone. Though the Indian was able to find a 
meagre sustenance upon the American desert, just as 
the Arab does upon the African, it was of a kind upon 
which the white man could not well exist. The uncon- 
quered Apaches plundered wagon-trains and mail- 
coaches just as the Tuareg occasionally plunders the 

22 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

Saharan trade caravans to-day, and the only white men 
were the soldiers at scattered and lonely posts or des- 
peradoes flying from the law. There is, indeed, a 
striking similarity between the conditions which pre- 
vail to-day along France's African borders and those 
which existed within the memories of most of us upon 
our own frontier. 

Then the railways came to the American West, 
just as they are coming to North Africa to-day, and the 
desert was awakened from its lethargy of centuries by 
the shriek of the locomotive. The first railroads to be 
constructed were designed primarily as highways be- 
tween the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards, with 
hardly a thought of revenue from the desert itself. 
But hard on the heels of the railway-builders followed 
the miners and the cattlemen, so that to-day the iron 
highway across the desert is bordered by prosperous 
cities and villages, by mines and oil-derricks and ranches 
and white farm-houses with green bHnds, this one-time 
arid region, which the wiseheads of thirty years ago 
pronounced worthless, now yielding a wealth twice as 
much per capita as that of any other portion of the 
United States. 

What has already been accomplished in the Ameri- 
can desert, French braina, French energy, and French 
machinery are fast accomplishing in the Sahara. 
Thanks to the recent invention, by a non-commissioned 
ofiicer of France's African forces, of a six-wheeled motor- 
sledge driven by a light but powerful aeroplane engine, 
the problem of rapid communication in these desert 

23 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

regions, which have hitherto been impassable to any 
kind of animal or mechanical traction, has been solved. 
As the new vehicle has proved itself capable of main- 
taining a speed over sand dunes of twenty miles an 
hour, it promises to be of invaluable assistance to the 
French in their work of opening up the waste places. 
Not only have French expeditions explored and charted 
the whole of the unknown regions, but they have thor- 
oughly investigated the commercial possibiHties of the 
immense territories which have recently come under 
their control. These investigations have shown that 
the Sahara is very far from being the sandy plain, flat 
as a billiard-table, which the pictures and descriptions 
in our school geographies led us to believe, and which 
the reports of those superficial travellers who had only 
journeyed into the desert as far as Biskra, in Algeria, 
or Ghadanies, in Tripolitania, confirmed, but is, on the 
contrary, of a remarkably varied surface, here rising 
into plateaus like those of Tibesti and Ahaggar, there 
crossed by chains of large and fertile oases, and again 
broken into mountain ranges, with peaks eight thou- 
sand feet high, greater than the AUeghanies and very 
nearly as great as the Sierra Nevadas. 

An oasis, by the way, does not necessarily consist, 
as the reading public seems to believe, of a clump of 
palm-trees beside a brackish well, many of them being 
great stretches of well-watered and cultivated soil, 
sometimes many square miles in extent, and rich in fig, 
pomegranate, orange, apricot, and olive trees. The oasis 
of Kaouer, for example, with its one hundred thousand 

24 




A ROUGH RIDER OF THE DESERT. 

The hard-riding, dare-devil Arabs fram whom France recruits her Spahis, or native cavalry, play 
much the same role in North Africa that the cow-puncher does in our own West. 



THE THIRD EMPIRE 

date-palms, furnishes subsistence for the inhabitants of 
a score of straggUng villages, with their camels, flocks, 
and herds. There are said to be four million date-palms 
in the oases of the Algerian Sahara alone, and to cut 
down one of them is considered as much of a crime as 
arson is in a great city, for its fruit is a sufficient food, 
from its leaves a shelter can be made which will keep 
out sun and wind and rain, and its shade protects 
Ufe and cultivation. Many date plantations and even 
vineyards have flourished for several years past in 
southernmost Algeria by means of water from below 
the surface, while the chief of the French geodetic sur- 
vey recently announced that a tract in the very heart 
of the Sahara, nine degrees in longitude by twelve de- 
grees in latitude, is already sufficiently watered for the 
raising of grain. The reports of these expeditions and 
commissions bear with painstaking thoroughness on 
the productivity of the soil, the suitabiHty of the cK- 
mate, the existence and accessibility of forest wealth, 
the presence and probable extent of mineral veins, and 
on transportation by road, rail^ and river over all that 
huge territory which comprises France's African empire. 
The story of French success in the exploration, the 
civilisation, the administration, and the exploitation 
of Africa is one of the wonder-tales of history. That 
she has rehed on the resources of science rather than 
on those of miHtarism makes her achievement the 
more remarkable, for where England's possessions have 
largely been gained by punitive expeditions, France 
has won hers by pacific penetration. Look at Sene- 

25 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

gambia as it is now under French rule, and compare its 
condition with what it was as Mungo Park describes 
it at the end of the eighteenth century; contrast the 
modernised Dahomey of to-day, with its railways, 
schools, and hospitals, with the blood-soaked, cannibal 
country of the early '6o's; remember that Algeria has 
doubled in population since the last Dey, by striking 
the French consul with his fan, turned his country into 
a French department — and you will have a bird's-eye 
view, as it were, of what the French have accomphshed 
in the colonising field. 

If French Africa becomes in time a rich and pros- 
perous dominion — and I firmly believe that it will — ^it 
is to her patient and intrepid pioneers of civilisation — 
desert patrols, railway-builders, well-drillers, school- 
teachers, commercial investigators — that the thanks of 
the nation will be due; for they are pointing the way 
to millions of natives, on whose activities and necessi- 
ties the commercial development of Africa must event- 
ually depend. So I trust that those at home in France 
will give all honour to the men at work in the Sahara, 
the Senegal, and the Sudan or rotting in the weed- 
grown, snake-infested cemeteries of the Congo and So- 
maliland; men whose battles have been fought out in 
steaming jungles or on lonely oases, far away from 
home and friends and often from another white man's 
help and sympathy; sometimes with savage desert 
raiders, or in action against Hausa, Berber, or Moor; 
but oftenest of all with an unseen and deadher foe — 
the dread African fever. 

26 



CHAPTER II 

THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

AN unaccustomed silence hung over the labyrinth 
. of court-yards, corridors, gardens, mosques, and 
kiosks which compose the imperial palace in Fez. The 
chatter of the harem women was hushed; the white- 
robed officials of the household shpped through the 
mosaic-paved passages like melancholy ghosts; even 
the slovenly sentries at the gates, their red tunics over 
their heads to protect them from the sun, seemed to 
tread more softly, as though some great one lay dying. 
Within the palace, in a room whose furnishings were a 
strange jumble of Oriental taste and European tawdri- 
ness, a group of men stood about a table. Certain of 
them were tall and sinewy and swarthy, their white 
burnooses, which enveloped them from their snowy 
turbans to their yellow slippers, marking them un- 
mistakably as Moors. Of the others, whose clearer 
skins showed them to be Europeans, some wore the 
sky-blue tunics and scarlet breeches of the chasseurs 
d'Afrique, some the braided jackets and baggy trousers 
of the tirailleur regiments, some the simple white 
Hnen of the civil administration, while across the chest 
of one, a grizzled man with the epaulettes of a general 
of division, slanted a broad scarlet ribbon. At the 
table sat an old-young man, a man with an aquiline, 

27 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

high-bred nose, a wonderfully clear, olive skin, and a 
fringe of scraggy beard along the line of his chin, a man 
with a weak mouth and sensual lips and heavy-lidded, 
melancholy eyes. The man with the scarlet ribbon un- 
rolled a parchment and, bowing, spread it upon the 
table. One of the native dignitaries, with a gesture of 
reverence which included heart and lips and head, 
dipped a quill pen into an ink-well and tendered it to 
the silent figure at the table. "Your Majesty will have 
the goodness to sign here?" said the soldier, half-ques- 
tioningly, half-commandingly, as he indicated the place 
with his finger. The man at the table gravely inclined 
his head, reached for the pen, hesitated for a moment, 
then slowly began to trace, from right to left, the strange 
Arabic signature. "Inshallah! It is done!" he said, 
and throwing down the pen he sunk his face into his 
hands. "Vive la France!" said the general solemnly, 
and "Vive la France!" echoed the officers around him. 
Well might the one lament and the others rejoice, for, 
with the final flourish of the Sultan's pen, Morocco had 
ceased to exist as an independent nation and France 
had added an empire to her dominions. 

"The world is a peacock," says a Moorish prov- 
erb, "and Morocco is the tail of it." Now, however, 
it has become the tail of the Gallic cock, for when, on 
March the thirtieth, 191 2, Sultan Mulai-abd-el-Hafid 
signed the treaty establishing a French protectorate 
over his country, Morocco entered upon a new phase 
of its existence. With that act there ended, let us hope 
for all time, a situation which on more than one occa- 

28 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

sion has threatened the peace of the world. Not since 
the Enghsh landed in Egypt a third of a century ago 
has an event occurred which so vitally concerns the 
future welfare of Africa; not since the Treaty of Tilsit 
has France won so decisive a diplomatic victory or 
added so materially to her territorial possessions. By 
the signing of that treaty France laid the final stone 
in the mighty colonial structure which she has built 
up in Africa, and opened to Christianity, civilisation, 
and commerce the door of a region which has hitherto 
been a synonym for mystery, cruelty, intolerance, and 
fanaticism. 

Though scarcely forty hours of travel by train and 
boat separate the departure platform at the Quai 
d'Orsay station in Paris from the landing-beach at 
Tangier, though its coast is skirted by the tens of thou- 
sands of American tourists who visit the Mediterranean 
each year, less is known of Morocco than of many re- 
gions in central Asia or inner Africa. Though a few 
daring travellers have made scattering crow's-feet upon 
its map, there are regions as large as all our New Eng- 
land States put together which are wholly unexplored. 
It is almost the last of the unknown countries. As its 
women draw their veils to hide their faces from the men, 
so the Moors have attempted to draw a veil of mystery 
and intolerance over the face of their country to hide it 
from the stranger. What strange tribes, what ruins of 
an earher civihsation, what wealth in forests or minerals 
lie behind its ranges can only be conjectured. Its maps 
are still without the names of rivers and mountains and 

29 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

towns — though the rivers and mountains and towns are 
there; the sole means of travel are on camels, mules, or 
donkeys along the wild, worn paths, it being the only 
country of any size in the world which cannot boast so 
much as a mile of railway; its ports and the two high- 
ways leading from the coast to its capitals, Fez and 
Morocco City, were, until the coming of the French, 
alone open to the traveller — and none too safe at that; 
the foreigner who has the hardihood to stray from the 
frequented paths is taking his life in his hands. Few of 
the maps of Morocco are, so far as accuracy is concerned, 
worth the paper they are printed on, being largely based 
on unscientific material eked out by probabilities and 
conjectures, there being less accurate information, in 
fact, about a country larger than France, and only two 
days' journey from Trafalgar Square, than there is about 
Abyssinia or Borneo or Uganda. Even the names which 
we have given to the country and its inhabitants are 
purely European terms and are neither used nor recog- 
nised by the people themselves, who call their country 
El Moghreb el Aska, which means literally "Sunset 
Land," the term Morocco being a European corruption 
of the name of one of its capitals, Marrakesh, or, as it 
is known to foreigners, Morocco City. A land almost 
as large as the State of Texas, with snow-capped moun- 
tain ranges, navigable rivers, vast forests, a fertile soil, 
an abundant water supply, and an ideal climate; a 
land of walled cities and white villages, of domed 
mosques and slender minarets, of veiled women and 
savage, turbaned men; a land of strange peoples and 

30 




THE GREAT PRAYER IN THE DESERT. 
Once each year thousands of Moslems, many of whom journey hundreds of miles by camel or afoot 
for the purpose, meet at a spot in the desert, near Biskra, in the Algerian Sahara, to join 
in prayer. 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

still stranger customs; a land of mystery and fatalism, 
of suspicion and fanaticism, of cruelty and corruption, 
of confusion and contradiction — that is Morocco, where, 
as an Arabic writer has put it, a wise man is surprised 
at nothing that he sees and believes nothing that 
he hears. 

This empire which has come under the shadow of 
the tricolour is, above all else, a white man's coun- 
try. Unlike India and Tripolitania and Rhodesia and 
the Sudan, Morocco is a country which is admirably 
adapted for European colonisation, being blessed with 
every natural advantage that creation has to offer. Its 
only objectionable feature is its people. Lying at the 
western gateway of the Mediterranean, where the nar- 
rowed sea has so often proved a temptation to invasion, 
its Atlantic ports within striking distance of the great 
lanes of commerce between Europe and South America 
and South Africa, Morocco occupies a position of enor- 
mous strategic, political, and commercial importance. 
The backbone of the country is the Great Atlas, which, 
taken as a whole, has a higher mean elevation than that 
of any other range of equal length in Europe, Africa, or 
western Asia, attaining in places an elevation of nearly 
fifteen thousand feet. Snow-clad, this mighty and iso- 
lated wall rises so abruptly from the plain that it needs 
but little stretch of the imagination to understand how 
the ancients believed that on it rested the heavens — 
whence, indeed, its name. Personally, the thing that 
surprised me most in Morocco was the total absence 
of desert. Either because of its proximity to the Sa- 

31 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

hara, or because of its camels, or the two combined, I 
went to Morocco expecting that I should find vast 
strectches of sun-baked, yellow sand. As a matter of 
fact, I found nothing of the kind. Traversed from east 
to west, as I have already said, by the strongly defined 
range of the Atlas, the greater part of its surface is really 
occupied by rolling prairies, diversified by low hills, 
and not at all unhke Ohio and Indiana. Though ad- 
mirably adapted to the growing of cereals, the strict 
prohibition against the exportation of grain has natu- 
rally resulted in discouraging the native farmers, so 
that immense tracts of fertile land remain uncultivated. 
The alluvial soil, which is remarkable for ks richness, 
frequently reaches a depth of fifteen feet and could be 
brought to an almost incredible degree of productive- 
ness by the application of modern agricultural methods. 
What greater praise can be given to any soil than to 
say that it will bear three crops of potatoes in a single 
year and that corn is commonly sown and reaped all 
within the space of forty days? 

Unlike its neighbouring countries, Algeria, Tunisia, 
and Tripolitania, Morocco does not lack for navigable 
waterways, for it possesses several large rivers which 
could be navigated for hundreds of miles inland, 
though at present, owing to the apathy of the inhabi- 
tants, and the unsettled condition of the regions along 
their banks, they are used for neither traffic nor irriga- 
tion. The chief of these is the Muluya, which, with its 
tributary the Sharef, provides northeastern Morocco 
with a valuable commercial waterway for a distance of 

32 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

more than four hundred miles. The most important 
river of northwest Morocco is the Sebu, which empties 
into the Atlantic, while in the central and western dis- 
tricts the Kus, the Bu-Regreg, the Sus, and the Assaka 
will, under the new regime, prove invaluable as means 
of opening up the country. 

A very large number of people seem to be under the 
impression that Morocco is unhealthy and suffers from 
a sweltering heat. Nothing could be farther from the 
truth. The cHmate is, as a matter of fact, extremely 
healthful, malaria, the scourge of the other countries of 
North Africa, being unknown. In the regions lying 
between the central range of the Atlas and the sea the 
thermometer seldom rises above ninety degrees or falls 
below forty degrees, the mountain wall serving as a 
protection from the scorching winds of the Sahara. 
During the winter months the rains are so heavy and 
frequent along the Atlantic coast that good pasturage 
is found as far south as Cape Juby, while in the interior 
the rivers frequently become so swollen that travel is 
both difficult and dangerous. The unpleasantness of 
the rains (and you don't know what discomfort is, my 
friends, until you have journeyed in Morocco during 
the rainy season) is more than compensated for by the 
beauties of the spring landscape. For mile after mile 
I have ridden across meadows literally carpeted with 
wild flowers, whose varied and brilliant colours, com- 
bined with the peculiar fashion in which each species 
confined itself to its own area, gave the countryside the 
appearance of a vast floral mosaic. After seeing these 

33 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

gorgeous natural combinations of colour — dark blue, 
yellow, white, and scarlet, iris, marigolds, lilies, and 
poppies — I no longer wondered where the Moors draw 
the inspiration for that chromatic art of which they 
left such marvellous examples in the cities of southern 
Spain. 

Though the country has, unfortunately, become 
largely deforested — for what Moor would ever think 
of planting trees, which could only be of value to an- 
other generation? — a wealth of timber still remains in 
the more remote valleys of the Atlas, the pines and 
oaks often attaining enormous size. Though Spanish 
concessionaires are profitably working gold mines in 
the Riff country, and the great German firm of Mannes- 
mann Brothers has acquired extensive iron-ore-bearing 
properties in the Sus, and though large deposits of silver, 
copper, lead, and antimony have been discovered at 
various points in the interior, the mineral wealth of 
Morocco is still a matter for speculation. It is not 
likely to remain so long, however, for history has shown 
that it is the miners who form the real advance-guard 
of civilisation. 

To the stranger who confines his investigations to 
the highways which connect the capitals with the coast, 
Morocco gives the impression of being very sparsely 
settled. This is due to the fact that the natives take 
pains to avoid the highroads as they would the plague, 
the continual passage of troops and of travellers, all of 
whom practise the time-honoured custom of living on 
the country and never paying for what they take, hav- 

34 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

ing had the natural result of driving the inhabitants 
into less travelled regions, though traders and others 
whose business takes them into the back country find 
that it is far more densely populated than most foreign- 
ers suspect. Heretofore it has been possible for almost 
any foreigner, by the judicious use of bakshish, to 
obtain from the authorities an official order which re- 
quired the people living along the roads to supply food 
both for him and his escort and fodder for their horses. 
Now, this was a very serious tax, especially among a 
people as poverty-stricken as the Moorish peasantry, 
and as a result of it the heedless traveller often caused 
much misery and suffering. But if the occasional trav- 
eller proved so serious a burden, imagine what it meant 
to these poor people when the Sultan himself passed, 
for, able to move only with an army, without any com- 
missariat or transport, and feeding itself as it went, 
he devastated the land of food and fodder as though he 
was an invader instead of a ruler, sweeping as ruthlessly 
across his empire as the Huns did across southern 
Europe, and leaving his subjects to starve. Is it any 
wonder, then, that the desperation of the wretched, 
half-starved peasantry has vented itself in repeated 
revolutions? The coming of the French is bound to 
change this deplorable and demoralising state of affairs, 
however, for, once assured of protection for their crops 
and justice for themselves, the fugitive country folk 
will quickly flock back and resume the cultivation of 
their abandoned lands. 

One of the facts about Morocco that will probably 
35 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

surprise most people — I know that it surprised me — is 
that the Berbers, who form fully two thirds of the popu- 
lation, are a purely white race, as white indeed, barring 
the tan which results from life under an African sun, 
as we ourselves. Though the generic term Moor is 
applied by Europeans to all the inhabitants of Morocco, 
there are really four distinct racial divisions of the 
population: the Berbers, who, being the earliest-known 
possessors of the land, are the genuine Moroccans, and 
are, when of unmixed blood, a very energetic and vig- 
orous people, indeed; the Arabs, who are the descend- 
ants of the Mohammedan conquerors of the country 
and possess to the full the Arab characteristics of arro- 
gance, indolence, and cruelty; the negroes, brought 
into the country as slaves from Central Africa in an 
influx extending over centuries, this admixture having 
resulted in deteriorating both the Berbers and the Arabs, 
the infusion of black blood showing itself in dark skins, 
thickened Hps, low foreheads, sensual tastes, and a 
marked stupidity; and lastly, but by no means the 
least important, the ubiquitous, persecuted, and per- 
secuting Jews. The Berbers dwell for the most part in 
the mountains, while the Arabs, on the contrary, are 
to be found only on the plains, it being the weak, sen- 
sual, and intolerant amalgam produced by the fusion 
of these two races, and tinctured with negro blood, which 
forms the population of the Moorish cities and to which 
the name " Moor " most properly belongs. 

Between the Moor of the mountains and the Moor 
of the towns there is as wide a gulf as there is between 

36 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

the natives of Vermont and the natives of Venezuela. 
The town Moor is sullen, suspicious of all strangers, 
vacillating; the pride, but none of the energy, of his 
ancestors remains. In his youth he is licentious in his 
acts; in his old age he is hcentious in his thoughts. 
He is abominably lazy. He never runs if he can walk; 
he never walks if he can stand still; he never stands if 
he can sit; he never sits if he can He down. The only 
thing he puts any energy into is his talking; he believes 
that nothing can be done really well without a hullabaloo. 
The men of the mountains are cast in a wholly different 
mould, however, from that of the men of the towns. 
Fierce enemies and stanch friends, they hke fighting 
for fighting's sake. They are intelligent and industrious ; 
though fonder of the sword and the pistol than of the 
plough and the hoe, their fertile mountain valleys are 
nevertheless fairly well cultivated. They are a hardy, 
warlike, and indomitable race and have never yet been 
conquered. It is well to remember in any discussion 
of these people that, through all the vicissitudes of their 
history, they have never before had the flag of another 
nation flying over them. All the successive invaders 
of North Africa have been confronted with the problem 
of subduing them, but always they have failed and have 
gone back. Not only that, but once the Moors went 
invading on their own account, crossing the Strait of 
Gibraltar, conquering all southern Spain, holding it 
for five hundred years, and leaving behind them the 
architectural glories of Seville, of Cordova, and of 
Granada to teU the story. Unless I am very much mis- 

37 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

taken, therefore, it will cost France many lives and 
much money to make them amenable to her rule. 

The decadence of the Moors is primarily due to two 
things: immorahty and racial jealousies. They are 
probably the most licentious race, in both thought and 
act, in the world. Compared to them the inhabitants 
of Sodom and Gomorrah were positively prudish. This 
extreme moral degeneracy is in itself enough to ruin 
the sturdiest people, but, as though it was not sufficient, 
the two principal races, Arab and Berber, hate each 
other as the Armenian hates the Turk, this racial an- 
tagonism in itself making impossible the upbuilding of 
a strong and united nation. In fact, the only thing 
they have in common is their religion, which is the air 
they breathe, and which, though incapable of produc- 
ing internal harmony, unites them in hostility to the 
unbeliever. 

There is less public spirit in Morocco than in any 
place I know. No Moor takes the shghtest interest in 
anything outside his personal affairs, and no one ever 
plans for the future — other than to hope that he will 
get a comfortable divan and his share of houris in Para- 
dise. The last thing that would occur to a Moor would 
be to spend money on anything which will not bring 
him in an immediate profit, so that, as a consequence, 
trees are never planted, mines never worked, roads 
never made, bridges never built. He does not want 
civilisation. He does not believe in modern inventions 
or improvements. What was good enough for his 
father is good enough for him. Why lug in railways and 

38 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

telegraphs, and similar contrivances of the devil, then, 
when things are good enough as they are? 

There is no cause for the other European nations 
to envy France the obligations she assumed when she 
declared a protectorate over Morocco. She has a long 
and hilly road to travel before she can convert her latest 
acquisition into a national asset. Before Morocco can 
be thrown open to French settlers its savage and hostile 
population will have to be as effectually subdued as were 
the Indians of our own West. The tribes of southern 
Morocco are especially hostile to the French occupa- 
tion, and many military experts believe that the pro- 
tectorate will never be enforced in those regions without 
a long campaign and much shedding of blood, while one 
eminent French general has openly asserted that it will 
take at least a dozen years fully to subdue the country. 

Personally, I am a firm believer in the future of 
Morocco and the Moors under the guidance and pro- 
tection of France. I have seen too much of what 
France has accomplished in far less favoured regions, 
and under far more discouraging conditions, to think 
otherwise. Nothing illustrates the latent possibilities 
of the Moorish character better than an experiment 
which was made some years ago. At the request of the 
Sultan, the British minister to Morocco asked his 
government for permission to send a body of Moors to 
Gibraltar for the purpose of being instructed in British 
drill and discipHne. The War Office acceding to the 
request, two hundred Moors, selected at random from 
various tribes throughout the empire, were sent to 

39 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Gibraltar and remained there for three years, the men 
being occasionally changed as they acquired a knowl- 
edge of drill. They had good clothing given them, slept 
in tents, and were allowed by the Sultan a shilling a day, 
receiving precisely the same treatment as British sol- 
diers. During the three years they were stationed on 
the Rock, there were only two cases in the police court 
against them for dissolute conduct or disorder. The sol- 
diers of what civilised nation could have made such a 
record? Colonel Cameron, under whose superintend- 
ence they were placed, reported that they learned the 
drill as quickly and as well as any EngHshmen, and that 
they were sober, steady, and attentive to their duties. 
(The Moors, it should be remarked, are noted for their 
abstemiousness, the precepts of the Koran which for- 
bid the use of spirits and tobacco being rigidly observed.) 
This tends to show that Moors, living under a just and 
humane government, and having, as these men had, 
proper provision made for their livehhood, are not a 
lawless or even a disorderly people, and that they are 
capable of being transformed, under such a form of 
government as France has established in Algeria and 
Tunisia, into the splendid warriors which their ances- 
tors were in Spain. It was, as I think I have remarked 
in the preceding chapter, the knowledge that France, in 
acquiring Morocco, would obtain the material for a 
formidable addition to her military forces which was, 
it is generally believed, one of the motives that inspired 
Germany's persistent opposition to a French protec- 
torate. 

40 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

Though the reins of Moorish power are already 
firmly in the hands of the French Resident- General at 
Fez, there is no reason to beHeve that the French ex- 
pect, for the present at least, to depose the Sultan, it 
being to their interests, for obvious reasons, to maintain 
the pleasant fiction that Morocco is still an independent 
empire to which they have disinterestedly lent their 
protection. In August, 191 2, Sultan Mulai-abd-el- 
Hafid, appreciating the emptiness of his title under the 
French regime, abdicated in favour of his brother, 
Mulai Youssef, who is known to be friendly to France. 
The new Sultan, who is the seventeenth of the dynasty 
of the Ahdes and the thirty-seventh lineal descendant 
of Ali, uncle and son-in-law of the Prophet, is known to 
his subjects as Emir-el-Mumenin, or Prince of True 
Believers, and as such he exercises a spiritual influence 
over his subjects which the French are far too shrewd to 
disregard. The position of the Sultan of Morocco has, 
indeed, become strikingly similar to that of his fellow- 
ruler in the other corner of Africa, the Khedive of Egypt, 
for, hke him, he must needs content himself henceforth 
with the shadow of power. Even if the imperial form 
of government is permanently maintained (and this I 
very much doubt, for it is characteristic of the Latin 
races — as Taine puts it — that they always want to oc- 
cupy a "sharply defined and terminologically defensi- 
ble position"), its real ruler will be the Resident-Gen- 
eral of France, whose policies will be carried out by 
French advisers in every department of the government 
and whose orders will be backed up by French bayonets. 

41 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

So long as Mulai Youssef is content meekly to play the 
part of a puppet, with French of&cials pulling the strings, 
he will be permitted to enjoy all the honours and com- 
forts of royalty, but let him once give ear to sedition, 
let him make the sHghtest attempt to undermine the 
authority of the French regime, and he will find himself 
occupying a sentry-guarded villa in Algiers near the 
residences of the ex-Queen of Madagascar and the ex- 
King of Annam, those other Oriental rulers who thought 
to match themselves against the power of France. 

The Sherifian umbrella, which is the Moorish 
equivalent of a crown, is hereditary in the family of the 
Filali Sherifs of Tafilelt. Each Sultan is supposed, 
prior to his death, to indicate the member of the im- 
perial family who, according to his conscientious belief, 
will best replace him. This succession is, however, 
elective, and all members of the Sherifian family are 
ehgible. It has generally happened that the late Sul- 
tan's nominee has been elected by public acclamation at 
noonday prayers the Friday after the Sultan's death, 
as the nominee generally has obtained possession of the 
imperial treasure and is supported by the body-guard, 
from whose ranks most of the court officials are ap- 
pointed. I might add that all of the Moorish Sultans 
in recent years have been so extremely bad that no suc- 
cessor whom they could appoint, or who could appoint 
himself, could by any possibility be worse. The pres- 
ent Sultan knows scarcely half a dozen places in his 
whole empire, and has spent most of his life in two of 
them — Marrakesh and Fez — having held, up to the 

42 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

time of his accession to the throne, the important post 
of Khahf of the latter city. The Moors never pray for 
their sovereign to journey among them, for, so disturbed 
has been the condition of the country for many years 
past, and so numerous have been the pretenders to the 
Sherifian throne, that recent Sultans have rarely ven- 
tured outside the walls of their capitals with less than 
thirty thousand followers behind them, so that when 
they had occasion to pass through the territory of a 
hostile tribe, as not infrequently happened, they fought 
their way through, leaving ruin and desolation behind 
them. Though both Mulai Youssef and his prede- 
cessors have always resided at one or the other of the 
two official capitals, the coast city of Tangier has here- 
tofore been the real capital of Morocco. Here lived the 
diplomatic and consular representatives of the foreign 
powers and, with a cynical disregard for the Moorish 
Government and people, ran things between them. 
Though considerations of safety doubtless entered into 
the matter, the chief reason for making Tangier the dip- 
lomatic capital was the extreme inconvenience to the 
foreign legations of being obliged to follow the court in 
its periodical migrations from one capital to the other. 
Therefore the diplomatic folk remained comfortably in 
Tangier — which, incidentally, can readily be overawed 
by a war-ship's guns — and the Sultan appointed minis- 
ters to treat with them there and thus carry on the 
foreign business of the state. When questions of great 
importance had to be negotiated special missions were 
sent to the capital at which the Sultan happened to be 

43 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

residing, the departure of these ambassadorial caravans, 
with their secretaries, attaches, kavasses, servants, and 
body-guards, not to mention the immense train of pack- 
mules and baggage camels, providing a spectacle quite 
as picturesque and entertaining as any circus procession. 
That feature of Moorish life disappeared with the com- 
ing of the French, however, for the foreign ministers 
will doubtless shortly be withdrawn; and hereafter, 
when any negotiations are to be conducted anent Mo- 
rocco, instead of a diplomatic mission having to make 
a two-hundred-mile journey on horses or camels, the 
ambassador at Paris of the power in question will 
step into his motor-car and whirl over to the Ministry 
of the Colonies in the Rue Oudinot. 

I know of nothing which gives so graphic an idea 
of the amazing conditions which have heretofore pre- 
vailed in Morocco, and to which the French are, thank 
Heaven, putting an end, as the speech which a former 
British minister. Sir John Drummond Hay, made some 
years ago to the reigning Sultan, and which was, prob- 
ably, the most extraordinary address ever made by a 
diplomatic representative to a foreign ruler. 

"Your Majesty has been so gracious as to ask me, " 
said Sir John, looking the despot squarely in the eye, 
"to express frankly my opinion of affairs in Morocco. 
The administration of the government in Morocco is the 
worst in the world. The government is Hke a commu- 
nity of fishes; the giant fish feed upon those that are 
small, the smaller upon the least, and these again feed 
upon the worms. In Hke manner the vizier and other 

44 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

dignitaries of the court, who receive no salaries, depend 
for their hvehhood upon peculation, trickery, corrup- 
tion, and the money they extract from the governors 
of provinces. The governors are hkewise enriched 
through peculation from tithes and taxes, and extor- 
tion from sheikhs, wealthy farmers, and traders. A 
Moor who becomes rich is treated as a criminal. 
Neither life nor property is secure. Sheikhs and 
other subordinate officials subsist on what they can 
extort from the farmers and the peasantry. Then 
again, even the jailers are not paid; they gain their 
livelihood by taking money from prisoners, who, when 
they are paupers, are taught to make baskets, which 
are sold by the jailers for their own benefit. How can 
a country, how can a people, prosper under such a 
government? The tribes are in a constant state of 
rebelKon against their governors. When the Sultan 
resides in his northern capital of Fez, the southern 
tribes rebel, and when he marches south to the city of 
Morocco, eating up the rebels and confiscating their 
property, the northern tribes rebel. The armies of the 
Sultan, like locusts, are constantly on the move, ravag- 
ing the country to quell the revolts. Agriculture is de- 
stroyed, the farmers and peasantry only grow sufficient 
grain for their own requirements, and rich lands are 
allowed to lie fallow because the farmers know the crops 
would be plundered by the governors and sheikhs. 
Thus it happens with cattle and horses. Breeding is 
checked, since the man who may become rich through 
his industry is treated as a criminal and all his posses- 

45 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

sions are taken from him, as in the fable the goose is 
killed to get the golden eggs. " 

France, in pursuing her Moroccan adventure, will 
do well to bear in mind two danger-spots : the Riff and 
the Sus. Unless she treads carefully in the first she is 
likely to become embroiled in a quarrel with Spain; 
with the natives of the Sus she will probably have 
trouble whether she treads hghtly or not. Sooner or 
later France is bound to come into collision with Spain, 
for, with Morocco avowedly a French protectorate, I 
fail to see how she can tolerate Spanish soldiers on its 
soil. Spain, basing her pretensions on her expulsion 
of the Moors from Granada in the reign of Ferdinand 
and Isabella, has always considered herself one of the 
heirs of Morocco. In fact, a secret treaty was signed 
between France and Spain in 1905 which distinctly 
defined the respective spheres of influence of the two 
powers in that country. By the terms of this treaty 
Spain was acknowledged to have predominating in- 
terests in those regions adjacent to the ports of Ceuta, 
Melilla, and El Araish, as well as in the Riff, a little- 
known and exceedingly mountainous district, believed 
to be rich in minerals, which lies in the northwestern 
corner of the empire, two days' journey eastward from 
Tetuan. Spain distinctly engaged not to take any 
action in the zone thus allotted to her other than to 
proceed with its commercial exploitation, but it was 
stipulated that, should the weakness of the Sherifian 
government make the maintenance of the status quo 
impossible, she should have a free hand in her sphere. 

46 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

France, meanwhile, steadily continued her "pacific 
penetration" of Morocco, pushing her Algerian railways 
closer and closer to Morocco's eastern frontier, mobilis- 
ing troops at strategic points, and overrunning the Sul- 
tan's dominions with ''scientific" expeditions and secret 
agents. Spain soon began to regard with envy and 
impatience the subtle game which the French were so 
successfully playing, but it was not until 1910 that she 
found the opportunity and the excuse for which she had 
been eagerly waiting. Some Spanish labourers, who 
were working on a railway which was being laid from 
Melilla to some mines a few miles distant, were at- 
tacked by Riffian tribesmen and a number of the Span- 
iards were killed. Spain jumped at the opportunity 
which this incident afforded as a hungry trout jumps 
at a fly, and a few days later a Spanish army was being 
disembarked on Moroccan soil. A sharp campaign en- 
sued which ended in the temporary subjugation of the 
RiflSans and the occupation by Spain of a considerable 
tract of territory extending from Ceuta eastward to 
Cabo del Agua and southward as far as Seluan, thus 
comprising practically all of Morocco's Mediterranean 
seaboard. A Moorish envoy was sent to Madrid and, 
after protracted negotiations, a convention was signed 
which permitted Spain to estabhsh a force of Moorish 
gendarmerie, under Spanish officers, at Melilla, Aljuce- 
mas, and Ceuta, for the maintenance of order in the 
districts near those places. Until this force has shown 
itself capable of maintaining order, the Spaniards assert 
that they will remain in occupation of the territory they 

47 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

now hold. Emboldened by her success in this adven- 
ture, and greedy for further expansion, Spain, in June, 
1 91 1, sent a vessel to El Araish (Laraiche) on the Atlan- 
tic coast, and a column was despatched from there to 
Alcazar, which Hes some twenty miles inland. The 
region was apparently perfectly calm at the time, and 
the reasons given by Spain for her action — that mysteri- 
ous horsemen had been seen upon the walls of Alcazar — 
appeared, in France at least, to be mere pretensions and 
raised a storm of indignation. As things now stand, 
France has proclaimed a definite protectorate over the 
whole of Morocco, an arrangement to which the Sultan 
has consented. Despite that proclamation, however, 
Spain continues to occupy a rich and extensive district 
of the country with an army of forty thousand men. 
By what means France will attempt to oust her — for 
oust her she certainly will — ^is an interesting subject 
for speculation and one which is giving both French 
and Spanish diplomats many sleepless nights. 

A word, in passing, upon the region known as the 
Riff. It is more discussed and less known than any 
other quarter of Morocco. Nothing has been written 
upon it except from hearsay and no European has pene- 
trated across its length and breadth, and this although 
it is but two days' ride on horseback from Tetuan. 
Situated in the very heart of the Great Atlas range, and 
accessible only through narrow passes and over rough 
mountain trails, this region has, from time beyond reck- 
oning, been the home and the refuge of that savage and 
mysterious clan known as the Riffs. Their feudal chief- 

48 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

tains live in great castles built of stone and lead much 
the same Hves as did the European nobles of the Middle 
Ages. The passes giving access to the Riff are com- 
manded by hill-top forts impregnable to anything short 
of modern artillery — and to get within range of them 
the artillery would need to have wings. They are a 
people rich in possibilities, are these Riffs, and one whom 
it is wiser to conciliate than to fight, as France will 
doubtless sooner or later learn. Brigands by nature, 
farmers in a small way by occupation, disciples of the 
vendetta, scorners of the law, suspicious of strangers, 
their only courts the gun and dagger, the Riffs have 
more in common with the mountaineers of the Blue 
Ridge than any people that I know. They have noth- 
ing in common with the other inhabitants of Morocco 
except their dress, wearing the universal brown hooded 
jellab and over it the toga-like white woollen haik, a 
skull-cap of red or brown, a belt with pouches of gaily 
coloured leather, and in it, always, a muzzle-loading 
pistol and the vicious curved knife, while over the shoul- 
der slants the ten-foot-long Riff rifle, coral-studded, 
brass-bound, ivory-butted, and almost as dangerous 
to the man behind it as to the one in front. The Riffs 
are fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and quite frequently red- 
haired, and claim to be descended from the Romans, 
which is no unreasonable assumption on their part, as 
the Romans were adventuring in Morocco — they called 
it Mauritania — long before Caesar's day. 

The other danger-point in Morocco is the Sus, a 
"forbidden" and unknown country through which only 

49 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

a handful of European travellers have ever passed, all 
in disguise and all in peril of their lives. The Sus 
is the rich and fertile valley lying between the Great 
Atlas and the Anti Atlas, and touching the Atlantic 
coast at Agadir. It is said to be thickly populated; 
it is believed to contain rich mines; it is fanatical to the 
last degree. Its Berber inhabitants, who are separated 
from the Arabs of the surrounding regions by a totally 
distinct language known as the Tamazight, or Tongue of 
the Free, though acknowledging the religious suprem- 
acy of the reigning Sultan, have always maintained a 
semi-independence, having never submitted to Moorish 
rule nor paid tax nor tribute to the government of 
Morocco. Twice within the last three or four decades 
Moorish Sultans have invaded and attempted to con- 
quer the Sus, but each time they have been driven back 
across the Atlas. The origin of the people of this re- 
gion is lost in the mists of antiquity. According to 
the Koran its original inhabitants were natives of Syria, 
where they proved themselves such undesirable citizens 
that King David ordered them to be tied up in sacks 
and carried out of the country on camels, since he 
wished to see their faces no more. Arrived in the 
vicinity of the Atlas Mountains, the leader of the cara- 
van called out in the Berber tongur "Sus!" which 
means "Let down! Empty out!" So the exiled un- 
desirables were dumped unceremoniously out of their 
sacks, and the country in which they found themselves, 
and where they settled, is called the Sus to this day. 
The people of the Sus have never Uked the French, and 

so 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

there is little doubt that they will oppose any attempt to 
treat them as a province of Morocco, and consequently 
subject to French control. It is obvious that France 
will sooner or later be obliged to send an expedition into 
the Sus for the purpose of asserting her power as well 
as to counteract the German influence which is rapidly 
gaining ground there, for the Sus, remember, is the 
region where Germany's interests in Morocco are cen- 
tred and provided the excuse for sending her gun-boat 
to Agadir and almost provoking a European war 
thereby. Germany still retains her commercial in- 
terests in the Sus Valley, and France will be obliged to 
step gingerly indeed if she wishes to avoid stirring up 
still another affaire Marocaine. 

If France accomphshes nothing more in Morocco 
than the extermination of the slave trade she will have 
performed a genuine service to humanity. Though 
slavery has been abolished in every other quarter of 
Africa, no attempt has ever been made by the European 
powers to put a check upon the practice in Morocco. 
Something over three thousand slaves, it is estimated, 
are imported into Morocco every year, most of them 
being brought by the terrible desert routes from Equa- 
toria and the Sudan, the trails of the slave caravans 
being marked by the bleaching bones of the thousands 
who have died on the way from heat, hunger, or ex- 
haustion. Many smug-faced people will assure you 
that slavery has been wiped out in Africa — ^praise be to 
the Lord! — but I can take you into half a dozen Mo- 
roccan cities and show you slaves being auctioned to the 

SI 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

highest bidder as openly as they were in our own South 
fifty years ago. There is a large and profitable demand 
for slaves, particularly girls and boys, in all of the 
Moroccan cities, a young negress having a market value 
of an)rwhere from eighty dollars to one hundred and 
twenty dollars. Although, as I have already remarked, 
the bulk of the slaves are driven across the Sahara by 
the time-honoured method, exceptionally pretty girls 
are often brought from West African ports in French 
vessels as passengers and disposed of to wealthy Moors 
by private sale. So great is the demand for young and 
attractive women that girls are occasionally stolen 
from Moorish villages, the slave-dealer laying a trail of 
sweets, of which the native women are inordinately 
fond, from the outskirts of the villages up to neigh- 
bouring clumps of trees, behind which he conceals him- 
self, pouncing out upon his unsuspecting victims as they 
approach. If France succeeds in stamping out the 
slave trade in Morocco as effectually as she has in her 
other African possessions, she will prove herself, as our 
missionary friends would put it, the flail of the Lord. 

Of all France's ambitious projects for the exploita- 
tion of North Africa in general, and the opening up of 
Morocco in particular, the one which most appeals to 
the imagination, and which, when executed, is likely 
to be of the greatest benefit to the world, is her astound- 
ing scheme for bringing South America a week nearer 
to Europe by means of a railway from Tangier, in 
Morocco, to Dakar, in Senegal. The route, as at pres- 
ent planned, would run from Tangier, via Fez, to Tuat. 

52 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

From Tuat the Sahara would be crossed and the Niger 
gained at Timbuktu. Though about three hundred 
miles of this section would He through the most hope- 
less desert country, it presents no great obstacle to 
engineers, the Sudanese line from Wady Haifa to 
Khartoum proving how easily the difficulties of desert 
construction and lack of water can be overcome. The 
third section would be from Timbuktu to Dakar, where 
the French within the last few years have created a 
magnificent naval port and commercial harbour. Al- 
ready Timbuktu and Dakar are in regular communica- 
tion by a mixed steamer and railway service, the jour- 
ney taking, when the Senegal is in flood, but five days. 
As such a system would have, of necessity, to be inde- 
pendent of the Niger and Senegal river services, which 
are not always reliable, a line is now under construction 
which will bring Timbuktu into direct rail communi- 
cation with Dakar, thus eliminating the difficulties and 
uncertainties of river navigation. From Dakar to Per- 
nambuco, in Brazil, is less than fifteen hundred miles, 
which could be covered by a fast steamer in three days. 
There are already regular sailings between these ports, 
but with the completion of this trans-African system 
(and, believe me, it is far from being as chimerical as 
it sounds, for the French do not let the grass grow under 
their feet when they once get a clear right of way for 
railway-building) ocean greyhounds will be placed in 
service between Dakar and the South American ports, 
it being estimated that the traveller who purchases 
his ticket via Madrid, Gibraltar, and then over the 

53 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Moroccan-Saharan system, can journey from Paris to 
Rio de Janeiro in twelve days. It is obvious that^ in 
some such scheme as this lies the future of the French 
Sahara, as well as the enormously increased prosperity 
of the Moroccan hinterland and of the Niger-Senegal 
possessions, for it was just such a trans-continental 
line, remember, which brought population and pros- 
perity to the desert regions of our own West. 

It is no light task to which France has pledged 
herself in agreeing to effect the regeneration of an em- 
pire so decrepit and decadent as Morocco, but that she 
will accomphsh it is as certain as that the leaves come 
with the spring. The changes which the coming of the 
French will effect in Morocco stretch the imagination 
almost to the breaking-point. Already the wireless 
crackles and splutters from a mast erected over the 
French Residency in Fez. With the proclamation of 
the protectorate the waiting railway-builders jumped 
their rail-heads across the Moroccan border as home- 
steaders, hearing the signal gun, jump their horses over 
the border of newly opened lands. Two or three years 
more and the traveller will be able to purchase through 
tickets to Fez and Marrakesh as easily as he can now to 
San Francisco or Milan. At Tangier, Rabat, El Araish, 
Mogador, and Agadir harbours will be dredged, break- 
waters built, and wharves constructed, while the filthy, 
foul-smelling cities will be made as clean and sanitary 
as Tunis and Algiers. Under French control Tangier, 
with its ideal climate, its picturesque features, and its 
splendid situation, will rival Cairo and the Riviera as 

54 



THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL 

a fashionable winter resort. The Moorish peasantry 
will be permitted to till their farms in peace, undis- 
turbed by devastating armies, while the warlike Riffs 
can have their fill of fighting in French uniforms and 
under the French flag. This is no empty vision, re- 
member. Peace, progress, and prosperity are bound to 
come to Morocco, just as they have come to those other 
African regions upon which the Frenchman has set his 
hand. Just how soon they come depends largely upon 
the Moors themselves. 



55 



CHAPTER III 
SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

ZORAH- BEN -ABD ALLAH was a perilously 
pretty girl, judged by any standard that you 
please. She was unveiled — a strange thing for an 
Eastern woman — and the clearness of her cafe-au-lait 
complexion was emphasised by carmine lips and by 
blue-black hair, bewilderingly becoiffed and bewitch- 
ingly bejewelled; her eyes Scherazade would have 
envied. She was leaning from the window of a second- 
class compartment in the ramshackle train which plies 
between Constantine and Biskra and was quite openly 
admiring the very tight light-blue tunic and the very 
loose scarlet riding-breeches of my companion, a young 
officer of chasseurs d'Afrique who was rejoining his 
regiment at El-Kantara. 

"She's a handsome girl," said I. 

"Not for an Ouled-Nail," said he, adjusting his 
monocle and staring at her critically, very much as 
though he were appraising a horse. "An Ouled-Nail's 
face is her fortune, you know, and in the Ziban, where 
they come from, she wouldn't get a second look. " 

"She would get several second looks on Broad- 
way," said I, taking another one myself. "I once 
travelled twelve thousand miles to see some women not 
half as pretty. " 

56 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

That is why I went to the Ziban, that strange and 
almost unknown zone of oasis-dotted steppes in south- 
ernmost Algeria. Hemmed in between the Atlas Moun- 
tains and the Great Sahara, it forms the real Algerian 
hinterland, a region vastly different in people, manners, 
and customs from either the desert or the littoral. 
Here, in this fertile borderland, where the red tar- 
booshes and baggy trousers of the French outposts are 
the sole signs of civilisation, is the home of the Ouled- 
Nails, that curious race, neither Arab, Berber, nor Moor, 
the beauty of whose dusky, daring daughters is a staple 
topic of conversation in every harem and native coffee- 
house between the Pyramids and the Pillars of Hercules. 

Rather than that you should be scandalised later 
on, it would be well for you to understand in the be- 
ginning that the women of the Ouled-Nail are, so far as 
morality is concerned, as easy as an old shoe. It comes 
as something of a shock, after seeing these petite and 
pretty and indescribably picturesque women on their 
native heath, or rather on their native sands, to learn 
that from earliest childhood they are trained for a life 
of indifferent virtue very much as a horse is trained for 
the show-ring. But it is one of those conditions of 
African life which must be accepted by the traveller, 
just as he accepts as a matter of course the heat and the 
insects and the dirt. 

Breaking home ties almost before they have en- 
tered their teens, they make their way to Biskra, to 
Constantine, and to Algiers, yes, and to Tripoli on the 
east and to Tangier on the west, dancing in the native 

57 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

coffee-houses or in the harems of the rich and not in- 
frequently earning considerable sums thereby. The 
Ouled-Nail promptly converts all of her earnings that 
she can spare into gold, linking these gold pieces to- 
gether into a sort of breastplate, not at all unlike that 
jingling, glittering affair which Mary Garden wears in 
her portrayal of Salome. When this golden garment 
becomes long enough to reach from her slender, supple 
neck to her still more supple waist, the Ouled-Nail re- 
tires from business, returns to the tents of her people 
in the edge of the Great Sands, hides her pretty face 
behind the veil common to all respectable Moslem 
women, and, setting her daintily sHppered feet on the 
straight and narrow path of virtue, leads a strictly 
moral hfe ever after. 

The peculiar dances of the Ouled-Nails demand 
many years of arduous and constant practice. A girl 
is scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage 
of her mother, who has herself been a danseuse in her 
time, she begins the inconceivably severe course of gym.- 
nastics and muscle training which is the foundation 
of their strange and suggestive dances. From infancy 
until, scarcely in her teens, she bids farewell to the tent 
life of the desert and sets out to make her fortune in 
the cities along the African littoral, she is as carefully 
groomed and trained as a colt entered at the county 
fair. Morning, noon, and night, day after day, year 
after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, 
and her abdomen are developed and trained and sup- 
pled until they will respond to her wishes as readily as 

58 




Ouled-Natl dancing-girls. "Petite, piquant, and indescribably picturesque.' 




Women of the "Great Tents." The wife and daughter of a nomad sheikh of the Algerian Sahara. 
SOME SIRENS OF THE SANDS. 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

her slender, henna-stained fingers. Her lustrous, blue- 
black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed 
again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, 
and the flute and to sing the weird and plaintive songs 
the Arab loves; to make the thick, black native coffee 
and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By 
the time she is thirteen she is ready to make her debut 
in the dance-hall of some Algerian town, whence, after 
three or four or possibly five years of a life of indifferent 
virtue, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces, to the 
tented village from which she came, to marry some 
sheikh or camel-dealer and to bear him children, who, 
if they are boys, will don the white turban and scarlet 
burnoose of the Spahis and serve in the armies of 
France, or, if they are girls, will live the Hfe of their 
mother all over again. It will be seen, therefore, that 
the profession is an hereditary one, which all the women 
of the tribe pursue without incurring, so far as I could 
learn, a hint of scandal or a trace of shame. It is a 
queer business, and one to which no other country, so 
far as I am aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the 
geishas of Japan, the nautches of India, and the oda- 
lisques of Turkey are but classes, the Ouled-Nails are 
a race, as distinct in features, language, and customs 
as the Bedouin, the Nubian, or the Jew. 

That the men of the Ouled-Nail (which, by the 
way, is pronounced as though the last syllable were 
spelled "Nile") look upon the lives led by their sisters, 
daughters, and sweethearts with much the same tolera- 
tion and approval that an up-State farmer shows for the 

59 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

village maid who goes to the city to earn a living as a 
waitress, a stenographer, or a shop-girl, is proved by a 
little incident which Mr. S. H. Leeder, the English 
author-traveller, tells of having once witnessed on the 
station-platform at Biskra. A tall young tribesman of 
the Ouled-Nail, the son of a sheikh of some importance, 
was leaving Biskra, to which town he had been paying a 
short visit with his mother. He was taking back with 
him one of his countrywomen, a dancing-girl named 
Kadra, who had been a resident in the Rue Sainte, as 
Biskra's Tenderloin is known, for two or three years, 
and was quite celebrated for her beauty, with the in- 
tention of marrying her. Here was this girl, after such 
an amazing episode in her career, quietly dressed, veiled 
to the eyes, and carefully chaperoned by the prospec- 
tive bridegroom's mother, returning to assume a posi- 
tion of rank and consideration among her own people, 
while several of her late companions, tears of sorrow at 
the parting pouring down their unveiled and painted 
faces, clung to and caressed her with every sign of child- 
Hke affection. And such marriages, I have been assured 
by French officials, are not the exception but the rule 
in the Ziban. Never was the truth brought home to 
me more sharply that "East is East, and West is West, 
and never the twain shall meet" than in the land of the 
Ouled-Nails, where, unlike our own, it is never too late 
to mend; not even for a woman. 

Barring the two who appeared in the production 
of "The Garden of Allah," the only genuine Ouled- 
Nails ever seen in the United States were those who, 

60 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

owing to the enterprise of some far-seeing showman, 
were responsible for introducing that orgy of suggestive- 
ness known as the danse du ventre to the American pub- 
He at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a dance which, 
thanks to numerous but unskilled imitators, French, 
Egyptian, and Syrian, spread from ocean to ocean under 
the vulgar but descriptive nickname of "the houchee- 
kouchee. " As a matter of fact, the danse du ventre, 
as seen in the questionable resorts of our own country, 
has about as much in common with the real dance of 
the desert people, as performed on a silken carpet spread 
before the tent of some nomad sheikh, as the so-called 
" Spanish fandango" of the vaudeville stage has with the 
inimitably beautiful and difficult dances to be seen at 
Sefior Otero's dancing-academy in Seville. The dance 
of the Ouled-Nails is the very essence of Oriental de- 
pravity. It is the dance of the pasha's harem; it is the 
dance of those native cafes which the European tourists 
are always so eager to visit; it is the dance which every 
little girl of the tribe is taught — long years before she 
knows its meaning. 

Depraved though they are, the Ouled-Nails never 
depart in their dress from that which would be consid- 
ered perfectly proper and respectable even by Mr. 
Anthony Comstock, The painters of every country 
seem to have taken a peculiar delight in depicting Arab 
dancing-girls as conspicuously shy of clothing, but, 
picturesqueness aside, the decollete gown of an Ameri- 
can woman would embarrass and shock these daughters 
of the sands as much as it would all Moslems, for though 

61 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

they may be somewhat lacking in morals they are never 
lacking in clothes. The women of the Ouled-Nail are 
considerably below the medium height and, owing to 
the peci;Har fashion in which their gaudy-hued tarlatan 
skirts are bunched out around the waist and are short- 
ened to display their trim ankles and massive silver 
anklets, they appear even smaller than they really are. 
Their hands and feet are small and wonderfully per- 
fect — if one is able to overlook the nails stained crimson 
with henna; arched eyebrows meet over eyes as big and 
lustrous and melting as those of a gazelle; while their 
wonderful blue-black hair, plaited into ropes and heav- 
ily bejewelled — whether the "jewels" are genuine or 
not is no great matter — ^is brought down over the ears 
in the fashion which made Cleo de Merode famous. 

But the really distinguishing feature of the Ouled- 
Nail's costume is her jewelry. She has so much of it, 
in fact, that there is no gold to be had in Algeria. Ask 
for napoleons instead of paper money at your bank in 
Algiers and you will meet with a prompt 

"Impossible, m'sieur." 

"But why is it impossible?" you ask. 

"Because we have no gold, m'sieur," is the polite 
response. 

"Where is it, then?" you inquire, scenting a rob- 
bery or an anticipated run on the bank. 

"On the Ouled-Nails, m'sieur," the cashier courte- 
ously replies. 

And he speaks the literal truth. Every centime 
that a dancing-girl can beg, borrow, or earn goes toward 

62 




Pholograpli by Em. Predion, Biskra. 

OULED-NAILS DANCING IN THE DESERT. 

"The real dance of the desert people as performed on a silken carpet spread before the tent of some 

nomad sheikh." 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

the purchase of massive silver jewelry, anklets, brace- 
lets, and the like, and these in turn are exchanged for 
gold pieces — whether French napoleons, English sover- 
eigns, or Turkish liras she is not at all particular — 
which, linked together in that golden armour of which 
I have already spoken, envelops her lithe young body 
from neck to hips. When her portable wealth has at- 
tained to such dimensions it is usually the sign for the 
Ouled-Nail to retire from business, going to her desert 
husband with her dowry about her neck. 

When it is remembered that the native quarters of 
these towns in the edge of the Sahara are frequented by 
savage desert tribesmen who know little and care less 
about civilisation and the law, is it to be wondered at 
that time and time again these unprotected girls are 
done to death in the little rooms up the steep, dark 
stairs for the sake of the gold which they display so 
lavishly as part of their allurements? During my stay 
in one of these Algerian towns an Arab, stealthily com- 
ing up behind an Ouled-Nail as she was returning one 
night from the dance-hall through the narrow, deserted 
streets, drove a knife between her shoulders and, snatch- 
ing the httle fortune which hung about her heck, fled 
with it into the desert. But the arm of the French law 
is very long, reaching even across the sand wastes of the 
Great Sahara, and months later, when he thought all 
search for him had been abandoned, the fugitive felt 
its grasp as he sat, cross-legged, in the distant bazaars of 
Wadai. After that came the trial and the guillotine, 
for in Algeria, as in the other lands which they have con- 

63 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

quered, the French have taught the natives by such 
grim object-lessons that punishment follows swift on the 
heels of crime. 

Now, if that same crime had been committed fifty 
miles to the eastward, across the Tunisian frontier, 
the murderer would, in all likelihood, have gotten off 
with thirteen months in jail — that is, if he was caught at 
all. For, though the regency of Tunisia is French in 
pretty much everything but name, it has been deemed 
wise to maintain the fiction of Tunisian independence 
by permitting the Bey a good deal of latitude so far as 
the punishment of his own subjects is concerned, his 
ideas of justice (la justice du Bey it is called, in contra- 
distinction to la justice frangaise, which is a very differ- 
ent sort of justice indeed) usually working out in a 
fashion truly Oriental. In Tunisia all death sentences 
must be confirmed by the Bey in person, the condemned 
man being brought before him as he sits on his gilt-and- 
velvet throne in the great white palace of the Bardo. 
In the presence of the sovereign the murderer is sud- 
denly brought face to face with the members of his 
victim's family, for such things are always done dra- 
matically in the East. The Bey then inquires of the 
family if they insist on the execution of the murderer, 
or if they are willing to accept the blood-money, as it is 
called, a sum equivalent to one hundred and forty dol- 
lars, which in theory is paid by the murderer to the 
relatives of his victims as a sort of indemnity if he is 
allowed to escape with his life. If, however, he does 
not possess so large a sum, as is frequently the case, 

64 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

the Bey makes it up out of his private purse. Nine 
times out of ten, if the victim was a woman, the blood- 
money is promptly accepted — and praise be to Allah 
for getting it ! — for in Africa women are plenty but gold 
is scarce. In case the blood-money is accepted the 
murderer's sentence is commuted to imprisonment for 
twelve months and twenty-seven days, though just why 
the odd twenty-seven I have never been able to learn. 
But it may have been that it was an only son, or 
a husband, or a chieftain of importance who was 
murdered, and in such cases the relatives invariably 
demand the extreme penalty of the law. 

"Do you insist on his blood?" inquires the Bey, a 
portly and easy-going Oriental who has a marked aver- 
sion to taking life, even in the case of murderers. 

"We do, your Highness," replies the spokesman of 
the family, salaaming until his tarboosh-tassel sweeps 
the floor. 

"Be it so," says the Bey, shrugging his shoulders. 
"I call upon you to bear witness that I am innocent of 
his death. May Allah the Compassionate have mercy 
upon him! Turn him toward the gate of the Bardo," 
which last is the local euphemism for "Take him out 
and hang him." Five minutes later the wretch is 
adorning a gallows which has been set up in the palace 
gardens. 

Due north from the land of the Ouled-Nails, and 
hemmed in by the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas, 
is the Grand Kabylia, a wild, strange region, peopled 
by many but known to few. Whence the Kabyles came 

65 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

nobody knows, though their fair complexions, red hair, 
and blue eyes lead the ethnologists to suppose that they 
are a branch of that equally white and equally mysteri- 
ous Berber race who occupy the Moroccan ranges of 
the Atlas. Thirteen hundred years ago they came to 
North Africa from out of the East, bringing with them a 
civilisation and a culture and institutions distinctively 
their own. Retreating into their mountain fastnesses 
before that Arab invasion which spread the faith of the 
Prophet over all North Africa, they have dwelt there 
ever since, the French, who conquered them in the mid- 
dle of the last century only after heavy losses, having 
wisely refrained from interference in their tribal laws 
or customs, which remain, therefore, almost unmodified. 
Though the Kabyles, of all the Moslem races, treat 
their women with the greatest respect, neither imprison- 
ing them in harems nor hiding them beneath veils and 
swaddling-clothes, they share with the mountaineers of 
the Caucasus the somewhat dubious distinction of sell- 
ing their daughters to the highest bidder. Between the 
Circassians and the Kabyles there is, however, a distinc- 
tion with a difference, for, whereas the former sell their 
daughters in cold blood and take not the slightest in- 
terest in what becomes of them thereafter, the Kabyle 
parent expects, even if he does not always insist, that 
the man who purchases his daughter shall marry her. 
A fine, upstanding Kabyle maiden of fifteen or there- 
abouts, with the lines of a thoroughbred, the profile of a 
cameo, and a skin the colour of a bronze statue, will 
fetch her parents anywhere from eighty to three hun- 

66 




Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra. 

THE MARRIAGE ORDEAL OF A KABYLE BRIDE. 

"Cliid in her wedding finery, she stands through an entire morning against a pillar in the 
village square." 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

dred dollars, at least so I was told at Tizi-Ouzou, the 
chef-lieu of the district, and the man who told me as- 
sured me very earnestly that, the crops having been 
bad, a girl could be bought very cheaply, and begged 
me to think it over. 

Though the Mauresques of Algeria, the Jewesses of 
Tunisia, and the fair-skinned beauties of Circassia com- 
bine a voluptuous figure with an altogether exceptional 
beauty of complexion and features, the women of Kaby- 
lia, with their flashing teeth, their sparkling eyes, their 
full red hps, their lithe, slender bodies, and their 
haughty, insolent manners, suggest a civiHsation older 
and more sensuous, and entirely alien to our own. The 
humblest peasant girl, grinding the family flour between 
the upper and the nether stones in the doorway of a mud 
hovel, possesses so marked a distinction of feature and 
figure and bearing that it is not difficult to beheve that 
Cleopatra or Helen of Troy might well have come from 
this same race. 

The approach of a Kabyle woman is heralded in 
two ways: first, by a strong-scented perfume, which, 
like the celebrated parfum du Bey of Tunis, is composed 
of the blended scents of a score or more different kinds 
of blossoms, the odour changing from carnation to rose, 
to heHotrope, to violet, and so on every few minutes 
(no, I didn't believe it either, until I tried it) ; and, sec- 
ondly, by the clink and jingle of the bracelets, anklets, 
necklaces, and bijoux of gold, silver, turquoise, and coral 
with which they are loaded down, and which sound, 
when they move, hke an approaching four-in-hand. 

67 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Good specimens of this Kabyle jewelry are becoming 
increasingly difficult to obtain, by the way, and bring 
high prices in the shops of Tunis and Algiers, being 
eagerly sought after by collectors. 

Personally, I am quite unable to picture an admirer 
making love to one of these insolent-eyed beauties, for 
they are headstrong and hot of temper, and if the gentle- 
man happened to say the wrong thing he would very 
probably find the yataghan, which every Kabyle maiden 
carries, planted neatly between his shoulders. They 
seem to be fond of cold steel, do these Kabyles, for at 
the conclusion of a wedding ceremony the bridegroom, 
walking backward, holds before him an unsheathed 
dagger and the bride, following him, keeps the point of 
it between her teeth. Another wedding custom of 
KabyHa, no less strange, consists of the partial martyr- 
dom of the bride, who, clad in her marriage finery, 
stands for an entire morning with her back to a stone 
pillar in the village square, her eyes closed, her arms 
close at her sides, and her only foothold the column's 
narrow base, the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes. 
Despite the stern stuff of which the Kabyle women are 
made, it is small wonder that the bride usually faints 
before this peculiarly harrowing ordeal is over. 

As far removed from these half-savage women of 
Ouled-Nail and of Kabylia as a Philadelphia Quakeress 
is from a Cheyenne squaw are those poor prisoner 
women of whose pale, half-hidden faces the visitor to 
the North African coast towns sometimes gets a glimpse 
at the barred window of a harem, or meets at nightfall 

68 




Photograph by Lchnert b" Landrock, Tunis. 

A MAURESQUE OF TUNISIA. 

"Those women of whose half-hidden faces the visitor to the North African coast towns sometimes gets 

a fleeting ghmpse." 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

hastening home from their sole diversion, the weekly 
excursion to the cemetery. You can see them for your- 
self any Friday afternoon if you will loiter without the 
whitewashed gateway to the cemetery of Bou-Kabrin, 
on the hill above Algiers, for they believe that on that 
day — the Moslem Sabbath — the spirits of the dead re- 
visit the earth, and hence their weekly pilgrimage to 
the cemetery to keep them company. When the sun 
begins to sink behind the Atlas these white-veiled 
pyramids of femininity reluctantly begin to make their 
way back through the narrow, winding lanes of the 
native city, disappearing one by one through doors 
which will not open for them until another Friday has 
rolled around. Picture such a life, my friends: six 
days a week encloistered behind jealously guarded doors 
and on the seventh taking an outing in the cemetery ! 

That many of these Mauresque women of the coast 
towns are very beautiful — just as many others are ex- 
ceedingly ugly — there is but little doubt, though they 
are so sheeted, shrouded, veiled, and draped from pry- 
ing masculine eyes that a man may know of their 
beauty only by hearsay. I imagine that the dress of the 
Mauresque woman was specially designed to baffle mas- 
culine curiosity, for if Aphrodite herself were enveloped 
in a white Hnen sheet from head to waist, and in enor- 
mous and ridiculous pantaloons from waist to ankle, 
she could go where she pleased without being troubled 
by admirers. Not only is a Mauresque woman never 
permitted to see a man — or rather, the man is not per- 
mitted to see her, for despite all precautions she some- 

69 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

times manages to catch glimpses of people through the 
lattices of her harem windows — ^but she may not re- 
ceive a visit from her father or brother without her hus- 
band's permission. When she is ill enough to require 
the services of a physician — and she has to be very ill 
indeed before one is summoned — incredibly elaborate 
are the preparations. All the women of her household 
are ranged about the bed, while her servants hide her 
under the bedclothes almost to the point of suffoca- 
tion. If her pulse has to be felt a servant covers her 
hand and arm so carefully that only an inch or so of 
her wrist is visible. If she has hurt her shoulder, or 
back, or leg, a hole is made in the bedclothes so that the 
doctor may just be able to see the injured place, and 
nothing more. Should he have the hardihood to insist 
on looking at her tongue, the precautions are still more 
elaborate, the attendants covering the patient's face 
with their hands and just leaving room between their 
fingers so that her tongue may be stuck out. I know 
a French physician in Tunis who told me that he was 
once called to attend the favourite wife of a wealthy 
Arab merchant, and that while he was conducting the 
examination the lady's husband stood behind him with 
the muzzle of a revolver pressed into the small of his 
back. 

Always over the head of the Arab woman hangs the 
shadow of divorce. Nowhere in the world does the law 
so facilitate the separation of man and wife. If a man 
grows weary of his wife's looks, of her temper, or of her 
dress; if he wishes to replace her with another; or if 

70 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

he is tired of married life and does not wish a wife at 
all, he has but scant difficulty in getting rid of her, for 
in North Africa a divorce can be had in fifteen minutes 
at a total cost of a dollar and twenty cents. In theory, 
either husband or wife may divorce the other by a sim- 
ple formality, without assigning any reason whatever. 
As a matter of fact, however, actual divorce by the man 
is rare, the Moslem husband usually preferring to get 
rid of his wife by a process called repudiation, which 
bears with great injustice and cruelty on the woman. 
If he tires of her for any reason, or merely wishes 
to replace her, he drives her away with the words 
"Woman, get thee hence; take thy goods and go. " In 
this case, although the husband is free to remarry, the 
woman is not and can only obtain a legal release by 
returning to the man the money which he paid for her. 
The woman may apply to the courts for divorce with- 
out her husband's consent only if she is able to prove 
that he ill-treats or beats her without sufficient reason, if 
he refuses her food, clothes, or lodging, or if she dis- 
covers a previous wooing on her husband's part, all 
previous betrothals, or even offers of marriage, whether 
the other lady refused or accepted him, being considered 
ground for divorce. 

The next time you happen to be in Tunis don't fail 
to pay a visit to the divorce court. It is the most 
Haroun-al-Raschidic institution this side of Samarkand. 
A great hall of justice, vaulted and floored with marble 
and strewn with Eastern carpets, forms the setting, 
while husbands in 'turbans and lawyers in tarbooshes, 

71 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

white-veiled women and green-robed, gray-bearded 
judges complete a scene which might have been taken 
straight from the Arabian Nights. The women, 
closely veiled and hooded, and herded like so many 
cattle within an iron grill, take no part in the proceed- 
ings which so intimately affect their futures, their inter- 
ests being left in the hands of a voluble and gesticulative 
avocat. On either side of the hall is a series of alcoves, 
and in each alcove, seated cross-legged on a many- 
cushioned divan, is a gold-turbaned and green-robed 
cadi. To him the husband states his case, the wife 
putting in her defence — if she has any — through her 
lawyer and rarely appearing in person. The judge 
considers the facts in silence, gravely stroking his long, 
gray beard, and then delivers his decision — in nine cases 
out of ten, so I was told, in favour of the husband. 
Should either party be dissatisfied, he or she can take 
an appeal by the simple process of walking across the 
room and laying the case before one of the judges 
sitting on the other side, whose decision is final. A 
case, even if appealed, is generally disposed of in less 
than an hour and at a total cost of six francs, which 
goes to show that the record for quick-and-easy divorces 
is not held by Reno. 

It is characteristic of the Moslem view-point that 
infidelity on the part of the husband is no cause for 
divorce whatsoever, while infidelity on the part of the 
wife, owing to the strict surveillance under which Mos- 
lem women are kept and the prison-like houses in which 
they are confined, occurs so rarely as to be scarcely 

72 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

worth mentioning. Should a Moslem woman so far 
succeed in evading the vigilance of her jailers as to enter 
into a liaison with a man, instead of a divorce trial there 
would be two funerals. To put his wife and her para- 
mour out of the way without detection is a matter of 
no great difficulty for an Arab husband, for if any one 
disappears in a Mohammedan country the harem 
system renders a search extremely difficult, if not, in- 
deed, wholly out of the question. In fact, it has hap- 
pened very frequently, especially in such populous 
centres as Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, 
that a man has enticed his rival into his house, either 
keeping him a prisoner for life or slowly killing him by 
torture. Though the French authorities are perfectly 
well aware of such occurrences, neither they in Algeria 
and Tunisia nor the English in Egypt feel themselves 
strongly enough intrenched to risk the outburst of 
fanaticism which would inevitably ensue should they 
violate the privacy of a harem. 

I am perfectly aware of the fact that it has become 
the fashion among those travellers who confine their 
investigations of African life to the lanes about Mus- 
tapha Superieur, to the souks of Tunis, and to the alleys 
back of the Mousky, to pooh-pooh the idea that slavery 
still exists in North Africa. As a matter of fact, how- 
ever—though this the European officials will, for rea- 
sons of policy, stoutly deny — slavery not only exists 
sub rosa in Algeria and Tunisia and in Egypt, but slave 
markets are still openly maintained in the inland towns 
of Morocco and Tripohtania, the French and Itahan 

73 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

occupations notwithstanding. When a wealthy Mos- 
lem wants slaves nowadays he does not send traders to 
Circassia or raiders to Uganda, but he applies to one of 
the well-known dealers in Tetuan, or Tripoh, or Treb- 
izond, a marriage contract is drawn up, and all the 
ceremonies of legal wedlock are gone through by proxy. 
By resorting to these fictitious marriages and similar 
subterfuges, the owner of a harem may procure as many 
slaves, white, brown, or black, as he wishes, and once 
they are within the walls of his house, no one can possi- 
bly interfere to release them, for, the police being under 
no conditions permitted to violate the privacy of a 
harem, there is obviously no safeguard for the liberty, 
or even the Uves, of its inmates. As a result of this 
system, a constant stream of female slaves — fair-haired 
beauties from Georgia and Circassia, brown-skinned 
Arab girls from the borders of the Sahara, and negresses 
from Equatoria — trickles into the North African coast 
towns by various roundabout channels, and, though 
the European ojfficials are perfectly well aware of this 
condition of things, they are powerless to end it. The 
women thus obtained, though nominally wives, are in 
reality slaves, for they are bought for money, they are 
not consulted about their sale, they cannot go away if 
they are discontented, and their very Hves are at the 
disposal of their masters. If that is not slavery, I don't 
know what is. 

In those cases where the European authorities have 
ventured to meddle with native customs, particularly 
those concerning a husband's treatment of his wife, the 

74 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

interference frequently has had curious results. A 
wealthy Arab from the interior of Oran, starting on a 
journey to the capital of that province, bade the wife 
whom he adored an affectionate good-bye. Returning 
several days before he was expected, he seized the smil- 
ing woman, who rushed to greet him, tied her hands, 
and dragging her into the street gave her a furious beat- 
ing in the presence of the astounded neighbours. No, 
she had not been unfaithful to him, he said, between the 
blows, nor had she been unkind. He not only was not 
tired of her, so he assured the onlookers, but she was a 
veritable jewel of a wife. Finally, when his arm grew 
tired and he stopped to take breath, he explained that, 
passing through a street in Oran, he had seen a crowd 
following a man who was being dragged along by two 
gendarmes. Upon inquiry he learned that he was being 
taken to prison for having beaten his wife. Therefore 
he had ridden home at top speed, without even waiting 
to complete his business, so that he might prove to him- 
self, to his wife, and to his neighbours that he, at least, 
was still master in his own house and could beat his wife 
when he chose. 

And here is another incident which illustrates the 
fashion in which the French administrators in Algeria 
deal with those tickhsh questions which involve Arab 
domestic relations. A farmer and his wife were travel- 
ling through the interior; he was on a donkey and she, of 
course, on foot. Along came an Arab sheikh on horse- 
back and offered the woman a lift. She accepted, and 
presently, growing confidential, admitted that she was 

75 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

unhappily married and detested her husband. Her 
companion proposing an elopement, she readily agreed. 
Accordingly, when they came to a by-road, this Lochin- 
var of the desert put spurs to his horse and galloped off 
with the lady across his saddle-bow, paying no heed to 
the shouts and protestations of the husband toiling 
along in the dust behind. Though he succeeded in 
tracing the runaway couple to the sheikh's village, the 
husband quickly found that plans had been made 
against his coming, for the villagers asserted to a man 
that they had known the eloping pair for years as man 
and wife and that the real husband was nothing but an 
impudent impostor. Unable to regain his wife, he then 
appealed to the French authorities of the district, who 
were at first at somewhat of a loss how to act in the 
circumstances, for the Europeans in North Africa are 
always sitting on top of a powder barrel and a hasty or 
ill-considered action may result in blowing them higher 
than Gilderoy's kite. Finally, an inspiration came to 
the juge d' instruction before whom the matter had been 
brought. Placing the dogs of the real husband in one 
room, and those of the pretended husband in another, 
he confronted the woman with them both. Now, Arab 
dogs are notoriously faithful to the members of their 
own households and equally unfriendly toward all 
strangers, so that though her own dogs fawned upon her 
and attempted to Hck her hand, those of the sheikh 
snarled at sight of her and showed every sign of dis- 
trust. The judge promptly ordered her to be returned 
to her lawful husband — who, I fancy, punished her in 

76 




pa ^ 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

true Arab fashion — and had the village placarded with 
a notice in Arabic which read: "The testimony of one 
dog is more to be believed than that of a townful of 
Arabs. " To appreciate how much more effective than 
any amount of fines or imprisonment this notice proved, 
one must remember that the deadliest insult an Arab 
can give another is to call him a dog. 

Perhaps it is because they live so far from the con- 
taminating influence of civilisation, or what stands for 
civihsation in North Africa, that the lives of those women 
who dwell beneath the black camel's-hair tents of the 
Sahara are far freer and happier than those led by their 
urban cousins. Which reminds me of a little procession 
that I once met while riding through southern Algeria. 
It consisted of an Arab, his wife, and a donkey. The 
man strode in front, his rifle over his shoulder. Then 
came the donkey, bearing nothing heavier than its 
harness. In the rear trudged the wife, carrying the 
plough. Though the Arab women may, and prob- 
ably do, till the fields yoked beside a camel, a donkey, 
or an ox, their faces are unveiled and they are permitted 
free intercourse with the men of their tribe. Even 
among the nomad desert folk, however, women are 
regarded with indifference and contempt, the Arabs 
saying of a boy "It is a benediction," but of a girl "It 
is a malediction." With the Arabs a woman is pri- 
marily regarded as a servant, and long before a daughter 
of the " Great Tents" has entered her teens she has been 
taught how to cut and fit a burnoose, to sew a tent 
cover, and to make a couscous, that peculiar dish of 

77 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

half-ground barley, raisins, honey, hard-boiled eggs, and 
mangled fowl, stewed with a gravy in a sealed vessel, of 
which the Arabs are so fond. By the time she is ten 
her parents have probably received and accepted an 
offer for her hand — and praise Allah for ridding them of 
her! — and by the time she is twelve she is married and 
a mother. When a match has been decided upon — and 
it is by no means an uncommon thing for an unborn 
child to become conditionally engaged — several days of 
haggling as to the price which is to be paid for her en- 
sue, the bridegroom eventually getting her at a cost 
of several camels, cattle, or goats, her value being based 
upon her looks and the position of her parents. On 
the day of the wedding the bride — on whose unveiled 
face, remember, the bridegroom has never laid eyes — 
concealed within a swaying camel-Htter which looks 
for all the world hke a young balloon, preceded by a 
band and accompanied by all her relatives, is taken 
with much ceremony to her new home. When the 
long-drawn-out marriage feast is over, the hideous 
racket of the flutes and tom-toms ceases and the wed- 
ding guests depart. Alone in her tent, the bride awaits 
her husband, who will see her face for the first time. 
Seating himself by her side, her husband makes her 
take off, one by one, her necklaces, her rings, and 
her anklets, so that, unadorned, she may be estimated 
at her true worth. If, thus stripped of her finery, she 
is not up to his expectations, the man may even at this 
late hour declare the marriage off and send the girl back 
to her parents. Should he be satisfied with his latest 

78 



SIRENS OF THE SANDS 

acquisition — for it is more than likely that he already 
has three or four other wives — he produces a club, which 
he places on the floor beside her, a custom whose sig- 
nificance requires no explanation. An Arab husband 
does not confine himself to a stick in regulating his 
domestic affairs, however, for only a few months ago 
the French authorities of Oran divested a desert sheikh 
of the burnoose of authority because, in a fit of jealous 
rage, he had cut off his wife's nose. 



79 



CHAPTER IV 
THE ITALIAN ^' WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

SINCE the world began the arm of Italy has reached 
out into the Mediterranean toward Africa, its fin- 
ger pointing straight at Tripoli. Phoenicians, Greeks, 
Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards, and 
Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their 
turn, but of them all only the Arab and the Turk re- 
main. In every case a colonial empire was the mirage 
which beckoned to those land-hungry peoples from be- 
hind the golden haze which hangs over the African 
coast-hne, and in every case their African adventures 
ended in disappointment and disaster. After an in- 
terim of centuries, in which the roads and ramparts and 
reservoirs built along that shore by those primeval 
pioneers have crumbled into dust, the troop-laden 
transports of a regenerated Italy have followed in the 
wake of those Greek galleys, those Roman triremes, and 
those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by the recollec- 
tion of her disastrous Abyssinian adventure, Italy is 
imbued with the idea, just as were her powerful pre- 
decessors, that her commercial and poHtical interests 
demand the extension of her dominion across the Mid- 
dle Sea. 

Ever since the purple sails of Phoenicia first flaunted 
along its coasts the history of Tripolitania has been one 

80 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

of invasion and conquest. In the very dawn of history 
the galleys of Greece dropped anchor off this shore, in 
the belief that it was the Garden of the Hesperides, and 
the vestiges of their colony of Cyrenaica lure the ar- 
chaeologists to-day. The Greeks, who, because of its 
three leagued cities of Oea, Sabrata, and Leptis, named 
their new possession Tripolis, just as Decapolis signi- 
fied the region of ten cities and Pentapolis of five, re- 
treated before Carthage's colonial expansion, and the 
Carthaginians gave way in turn to the conquering 
Romans, who included the captured territory within 
their province of Africa and called it Regio Tripolitana 
— ^whence the name it bears to-day. Christianity was 
scarcely four centuries old when the hordes of fierce- 
faced, skin-clad Vandals, sweeping down from their 
Germanic forests, burst into Gaul, poured through the 
passes of the Pyrenees, overran Spain, and, crossing 
the Strait of Gibraltar, carried fire and sword and 
torture from end to end of the Mediterranean. Before 
another century had rolled around, however, BeHsarius, 
the great captain of Byzantium, had broken the Vandal 
power forever, and the troubled land of Tripohtania 
once again came under the shadow of the cross. Then 
the wave of Arab conquest came, rolling across North 
Africa, breaking upon the coasts of Spain, and not sub- 
siding until it reached the marches of France, supplant- 
ing the feeble Christianity of the natives of all this re- 
gion with the vigorous and fanatical faith of Islam. 
Though Ferdinand the Catholic, not content with ex- 
pelhng the Moors from Spain, continued his crusade 

8i 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

against the infidel by capturing the Tripohtan capital, 
the Knights of Saint John, to whom he turned the city 
over, surrendered to the beleaguering Turks just as 
the sixteenth century had reached its turning-point, 
and Turkish it has remained, at least in name, ever 
since. 

We of the West can never be wholly indifferent to 
the fate and fortunes of this much-harassed land, for 
our flag has fluttered from its ramparts and the bay- 
onets of our soldiers and the cutlasses of our sailors have 
served to write some of the most stirring chapters of its 
history. So feeble and nominal did the Turkish rule 
become that the beginning of the last century found 
Tripolitania little more than a pirate stronghold, ruled 
by a pasha who had not only successfully defied, but 
had actually levied systematic tribute upon, every sea- 
faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until 
the Pasha of TripoH overstepped the bounds of our 
national complaisance by demanding an increase in the 
annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand dollars which 
the United States had been paying as the price of its 
maritime exemption that the American consul handed 
him an ultimatum and an American war-ship backed it 
up with the menace of its guns. Standing forth in pic- 
turesque and striking relief from the tedium of the four 
years' war which ensued was the capture by the Tri- 
politans in 1803 of the frigate Philadelphia, which had 
run aground in the harbour of Tripoli, and the enslave- 
ment of her crew; her subsequent recapture and de- 
struction by a handful of blue-jackets under the intrepid 

82 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

Decatur; and the heroic march across the desert to 
Derna of General WilKam Eaton and his motley 
army. 

Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the General 
Armstrong at Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in 
the mazes of our national history. With the object of 
placing upon the Tripolitan throne the reigning Pasha's 
exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy all the 
demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier 
of fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul 
at Tunis, recruited at Alexandria what was thought to 
be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for 
the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified coast town six 
hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With 
a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score 
Greeks, who fought the Turk whenever opportunity 
offered, and a few squadrons of Arab mercenaries — less 
than five hundred men in all — he set out under the 
blazing sun of an African spring. Though his Arabs 
mutinied, his food and water gave out, and his animals 
died from starvation and exhaustion, Eaton pushed 
indomitably on, covering the six hundred miles of 
burning sand in fifty days, carrying the city by storm, 
and raising the American flag over its citadel — the 
first and only time it has ever floated over a fortification 
on that side of the Atlantic. 

A territory larger than all the Atlantic States, from 
Florida to Maine, put together; a dry climate as hot in 
summer and as cold in winter as that of New Mexico ; 
a surface which varies between the aridity of the Staked 

^3 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Plains and the fertility of the San Joaquin Valley of 
California; so sparsely populated that its fanatic, tur- 
bulent, poverty-stricken population averages but two 
inhabitants to the square mile — that is Tripolitania. 
Bounded on the west by Tunisia and the French and on 
the east by Egypt and the English, the hinterland of the 
regency stretches into the Sahara as far as the Tropic 
of Cancer. Its eleven hundred miles of coast-line set 
squarely in the middle of the north African Uttoral; its 
capital almost equidistant from the Straits, the Dar- 
danelles, and the Suez Canal; and half the great ports 
of the Mediterranean not twelve hours' steam away, the 
strategical, political, and commercial position of Trip- 
olitania is one of great importance. 

Tripolitania, as the regency should properly be 
called, or Libya, as the Italians have classically renamed 
it, consists of four more or less distinctly defined divi- 
sions: Tripoh, Fezzan, Benghazi, and the Saharan 
oases. Under the Turkish regime the districts of 
Tripoh and Fezzan have formed a vilayet under a vali, 
or governor-general; Benghazi has been a separately 
administered province under a mutes-sarif directly re- 
sponsible to Constantinople, while the oases have not 
been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which oc- 
cupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, 
is for the most part an interminable stony table-land, 
riverless, waterless, and uninhabited save along the 
fertile coast. The stretches of yellow sand which the 
traveller sees from the deck of his ship are not, as he 
fondly imagines, the edge of the Sahara, but merely 

84 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

sand dunes blown in by the sea, such as may be seen else- 
where on the Mediterranean coast. 

Sloping from these coastal sand dunes up to the 
barren interior plateau is a zone, averaging perhaps five 
miles in width, of an altogether remarkable fertihty, 
for its deep ravines, filled with considerable streams 
during the winter rains, continue to send down a sup- 
ply of subterranean water even during the dry season. 
By means of countless wells, round and round which 
blindfolded donkeys and oxen plod ceaselessly, the 
water is drawn up into reservoirs and conducted thence 
to the fields. In this coast oasis it is harvest-time all 
the year round, for, notwithstanding the primitive 
agricultural implements of the natives and their crude 
system of irrigation, the soil is amazingly productive. 
From April to June almonds, apricots, and corn are 
gathered in; in July and August come the peaches; 
from July to September is the vintage season, and the 
Tripolitan grapes vie with those of Sicily; from July 
to September the black tents of the nomad date and 
olive pickers dot the fields, though the yellow date of 
the coast is not to be spoken of in the same breath with 
the luscious, mahogany-coloured fruit of the interior 
oases; from November to April the orange groves are 
ablaze with a fruit which rivals that of Jaffa; the early 
spring sees the shipment of those "Malta potatoes" 
which are quoted on the menus of every fashionable 
hostelry and restaurant in Europe; while lemons are 
to be had for the picking at almost any season, of 
the year. 

8S 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Southward into the Sahara from the southern bor- 
ders of Tripoli stretches the province of Fezzan, its 
inaccessibihty, its prevalent malaria, and its deadly- 
heat having popularised it with Abdul-Hamid, of un- 
savoury memory, as a place of exile for disgraced cour- 
tiers and overpopular officials, presumably because 
of the exceeding improbability of any of them ever 
coming back. Artesian wells and scientific farming 
have proved in other and equally discouraging quarters 
of Africa, however, that the words "desert" and 
"worthless" are no longer synonymous, so there is no 
reason to beUeve that the agricultural miracles which 
France has performed in Algeria and Tunisia on the one 
hand, and England in Egypt and the Sudan on the 
other, could not be successfully attempted by the Ital- 
ians in Fezzan. Arid and inhospitable as this region 
appears to-day, it should be remembered that its Greek 
and Roman colonists boasted of it as "the granary of 
Europe. " What has been done once may well be done 
again. All that this soil needs, after its centuries of 
impoverishment and neglect, is decent treatment, and 
any one who has seen those vineyards on the slopes of 
Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hill- 
sides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious 
that every inch is tended with pathetic care, will pre- 
dict a promising agricultural future for an ItaHan 
Tripolitania. In its physical aspects, northern Trip- 
olitania resembles Europe much more than it does 
Africa; its cHmate is no warmer than southern Italy 
in summer and not nearly as unhealthy as the Campagna 

86 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

Romana ; while its soil, as I have already remarked, 
holds great possibilities for patient, hardy, frugal, in- 
dustrious agriculturists of the type of those twenty 
thousand Sicilians who are forced by poverty to emi- 
grate each year to America or the Argentine. Keep- 
ing these facts in mind, one does not have to seek 
far for the causes which underlay Italy's sudden ag- 
gression. 

Reaching Egyptward in the form of a mighty fist 
is the peninsula of Barka, the Cyrenaica of the ancients, 
officially known as the Mutessariflik of Benghazi, its 
many natural advantages of climate, soil, and vegeta- 
tion making it the most favoured region in the regency, 
if not, indeed, in all North Africa. While the climate 
and vegetation of southern TripoH and of Fezzan are 
distinctly Saharan, the date-palm being the character- 
istic tree, Benghazi is just as decidedly Mediterranean, 
its fertile, verdure-clad uplands being covered with 
groves of oak, cypress, oHve, fig, and pine. Though 
well suppHed with rain and, as I have said, extremely 
fertile, the Benghazi province, once the richest of the 
Greek colonies, is now but scantily populated. Scat- 
tered along its coasts are Benghazi, the capital, with an 
inextricably mixed population and one of the worst 
harbours in the world; Tobruk, which, because of its 
excellent roadstead and its proximity to the Egyptian 
frontier and the Canal, Germany has long had a covet- 
ous eye on; and the insignificant ports of Derna and 
Khoms, the lawless highlands of the interior being 
occupied by hordes of warlike and nomadic Arabs 

87 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

who acknowledge no authority other than their tribal 
sheikhs. 

South by east into the Libyan Desert straggle the 
Aujila and Kufra chains of oases, marking the course 
of the historic caravan route to Upper Egypt and pre- 
senting the aspect of a long, winding valley, extending 
from the Benghazi plateau almost to the banks of the 
Nile. Underground reservoirs lie so near the surface of 
the desert that all of these sand-surrounded islands have 
water in abundance, that of Jof, for example, support- 
ing over a million date-palms and several thousand peo- 
ple, together with their camels, horses, and goats. 

Such, in brief, bold outline, are the more salient 
characteristics — climatic, agricultural, and geograph- 
ical — of the region which Italy has seized. Everything 
considered, it was not such a long look ahead that the 
Italian statesmen took when they decided to play their 
cards for such a stake. Though neither soil nor cH- 
mate has changed since the days of Tripolitania's an- 
cient prosperity, centuries of wretched and corrupt 
Turkish rule, with its system of absentee landlords and 
irresponsible officials, has reduced the peasantry to the 
same state of dull and despairing apathy in which 
the Egyptian fellaheen were before the EngUsh came. 
If Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly beheve 
that it will be, the work of regeneration cannot be done 
by government railways and subsidised steam-ship fines 
and regiments of brass-bound officials, but by patient, 
painstaking, plodding men with artesian-weU drilling 
machines and steam-ploughs and barrels of fertiliser. It 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

may well be, as the Italian expansionists enthusiasti- 
cally declare, that Tripoli tania constitutes a "New 
Italy" lying at the ve y ports of old Italy, but it is 
going to take many, many millions of lire and much 
hard work to make it worth the having. 

To those unaccustomed to the sights and sounds 
and smells of the East, a visit to the town of Tripoli 
is more interesting than enjoyable. Both its harbour 
and its hostelry are so incredibly bad that no one ever 
visits them a second time if he can possibly help it. 
The harbour of Jaffa, in Palestine, is a trifle worse, if 
anything, than that of Tripoli; but the only hotel I 
know of which deserves to be classed with the Albergo 
Minerva in Tripoli is the one next door to the native 
jail in Aden. Picture a cluster of square, squat, stuc- 
coed houses, their tedious sky-lines broken by the min- 
arets of mosques and the flagstaffs of foreign consulates, 
facing on a crescent-shaped bay. Under the sun of an 
African summer the white buildings of the town blaze 
like the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at 
white heat; the stretch of yellow beach which separates 
the harbour from the town glows fiery as brass; while 
the waters of the bay look exactly as though they 
had been blued in readiness for the family washing. 
Within the crumbling ramparts of the town is a network 
of dim alleys and byways, along which the yashmaked 
Moslem women flit like ghosts, and vaulted, treUis- 
roofed bazaars where traders of two-score nationahties 
haggle and gesticulate and doze and pray and chatter 
the while they and their wares and the passing camels 

89 



THE Lt ST FRONTIER 

smell to heaven. Scattered here and there among the 
shops are native bakeries, ^n the reeking interiors of 
which, after your eyes become iccustomed to the dark- 
ness, you can discern patient camels plodding round and 
round and round, grinding the grain in true Eastern 
fashion between the upper and the nether millstones. 

Follow the narrow Strada della Marina past the 
custom-house, where the Italian sentry peers at you 
suspiciously from beneath the bunch of cock's feathers 
which adorns his helmet; past the odorous fish-market 
and so into the unpaved, unlighted, foul-smelling quar- 
ter of the Jews, and your path will be blocked eventually 
by the sole remaining reHc of Tripoli's one-time great- 
ness, the marble arch of triumph erected by the Romans 
in the reign of Antoninus Pius, now half-buried in 
debris, its chiselled boasts of victory mutilated, and its 
arches ruthlessly plastered up, the shop of a dealer in 
dried fish. In that defaced and degraded memorial 
is typified the latter-day history of Tripolitania. Be- 
fore the ItaHan occupation disrupted the commerce of 
the country and isolated Tripoli from the interior, by 
long odds the most interesting of the city's sights were 
the markets, which were held upon the beach on the 
arrival of the trans-Saharan caravans, for they afforded 
the foreigner fleeting but characteristic gKmpses, as 
though on a moving-picture screen, of those strange 
and savage peoples — Berbers, Hausas, Tuaregs, Tub- 
bas, and Wadaians — who are retreating farther and 
farther into the recesses of the continent before the 
white man's implacable advance. 

90 




THE SUKS OF TRIPOLI. 

The Italians spent a million dollars a day, for nearly twelve months, to conquer a country whose total 
trade is less than a million dollars a year. 



THE ITALIAN ''WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

All down the ages Tripoli has been the gateway 
through which weapons, cutlery, and cotton have en- 
tered, and slaves, ostrich feathers, and ivory have come 
out of inner Africa by plodding caravan. Since the sons 
of Ham first found their way across the wilderness of 
Shur, this region has been the terminus of three his- 
toric trade routes. The first of these runs due south 
across the desert to Lake Tchad and the great native 
states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, and Wadai; the 
second follows a southwesterly course across the Sahara 
to the Great Bend of the Niger and the storied city of 
Timbuktu; while the third, going south by east, long 
carried British cottons and German jack-knives to the 
natives of Darfur and the Sudan. Is it any wonder, 
then, that, fired by the speeches of the expansionists in 
the Roman senate, all Italy should dream of a day when 
the red-white-and-green banner should float over this 
gateway to Africa and endless lines of dust-coloured 
camels, laden with glass beads from Venice and cotton 
goods from Milan, should go rolling southward to those 
countries which lie beyond the great sands? But, lost 
in the fascination of their dream, the Itahans forgot 
one thing: modern commerce cannot go on the back 
of a camel. No longer may Tripolitania be reckoned 
the front door, or even the side door, to central Africa. 
As the result of French and British encroachment and 
enterprise, not only has nearly all of the TripoHtanian 
hinterland been absorbed by one or the other of these 
powers, but, what is of far more commercial importance, 
they have succeeded in diverting the large and impor- 

91 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

tant caravan trade of which the Itahans dreamed, and 
which for centuries has found its way to the sea through 
TripoH, to their own ports on the Nile, the Senegal, and 
the Niger, leaving to Tripolitania Italiana nothing but 
its possibilities as an agricultural land. 

The statesmen who planned, and the soldiers and 
sailors who executed, the seizure of Tripolitania, were 
obeying a voice from the grave. Though the over- 
whelming disaster to the Itahans at Adowa in 1896, 
when their army of invasion was wiped out by Menelik's 
Abyssinian tribesmen, caused the pohtical downfall of 
Crispi, the greatest Itahan of his time, his dream of 
Italian colonial expansion, like John Brown's soul, 
went marching on. With the vision of a prophet that 
great statesman saw that the day was not far distant 
when the steady increase in Italy's population and pro- 
duction would compel her to acquire a colonial market 
over-sea. Crispi lies mouldering in his grave, but the 
Itahan Government, in pursuance of the policy which 
he inaugurated, has been surreptitiously at work in 
Tripolitania these dozen years or more. 

Never has that forerunner to annexation known as 
"pacific penetration" been more subtly or more sys- 
tematically conducted. Even the Pope lent the gov- 
ernment's policy of African aggrandisement his sanc- 
tion, for is not the Moslem the hereditary foe of the 
church, and does not the cross follow close in the wake 
of Christian bayonets? Italian convents and monas- 
teries dot the Tripolitanian Httoral, while cowled and 
sandalled missionaries from the innumerable Italian 

92 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

orders have carried the gospel, and the propaganda of 
Italian annexation, to the oppressed and poverty- 
stricken peasantry of the far interior. Under the guise 
of scientists, Italian political and commercial agents 
have been quietly investigating the problems and possi- 
bihties of the regency from end to end, while the power- 
ful Banco di Roma, an institution backed with the 
funds of the Holy See, through its branches in TripoH 
and Benghazi, has been systematically buying up arable 
farm-lands from the impoverished peasantry at a few 
lire the hectare, which quadrupled in value with the 
landing of the first ItaHan soldier. 

Though prior to the war there were probably not two 
thousand native-born Itahans in the whole of Tripolita- 
nia, the numerous Jews, in whose hands was practically 
the entire trade of the country, were offered inducements 
of one kind and another to become ItaHan subjects, Italy 
thus laying a foundation for her claims to predominating 
interests in that region. On the pretext that the Turkish 
authorities had tampered with the foreign mail-bags, 
Italy demanded and obtained permission to estabhsh 
her own post-offices at the principal ports, so that for 
many years past the anomalous spectacle has been pre- 
sented, just as in other portions of the Turkish Empire, 
of letters from a Turkish colony being franked with 
surcharged ItaHan stamps. The most ingenious stroke, 
however, was the estabhshment of numerous Italian 
schools — and very good schools they are — where the 
young idea, whether Arab, Maltese, or Jew, has been 
taught to shoot — along Italian Hues. 

93 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

To those really conversant with the situation, 
Italy's pretexts that the activities of her subjects resi- 
dent in Tripolitania had been interfered with and their 
lives and interests seriously endangered sound some- 
what hollow. To tell the truth, Itahans have had a 
freer rein in the regency — and, incidentally, have caused 
more trouble — than any other people. Italy's real 
reasons for the seizure of TripoHtania were two, and 
only two: first, she wanted it; and second, she could 
get it. 

Now that she has TripoHtania in her grasp, how- 
ever, her task is but begun, for setting forward the hands 
of progress by occupation of Moslem territory has ever 
been a perilous proceeding. Though France shouldered 
the white man's burden in Algeria with alacrity, she 
paid for the privilege with just forty years of fighting; 
it took England, with all the resources of her colonial ex- 
perience and her colonial army, sixteen years to conquer 
the ill-armed Arabs of the Sudan, while the desperate 
resistance of the Mad Mullah and his fanatic tribes- 
men has compelled her practically to evacuate Somali- 
land; overthrown ministries, depleted war-chests, and 
thousands of unmarked graves in the hinterland bear 
witness to the deep solicitude displayed for the cause of 
civilisation in Morocco by both France and Spain; 
Russia spent a quarter of a century and the lives of 
ten thousand soldiers in forcing her beneficent rule on 
the Moslems of Turkestan. Italy will be more fortunate 
than her colonising neighbours, therefore, if she emerges 
unscathed from her present Tripolitanian adventure, 

94 



THE ITALIAN ''WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

for every page of the history of latter-day colonisation 
proves that seizure of Moslem territory never ends with 
a naval demonstration, a landing party, a staff with 
a descending and an ascending flag, and the flash and 
thunder of a national salute. 

When Italy pointed the noses of her transports 
Tripoliward she committed the incredible blunder of un- 
derestimating for a second time the resistance that she 
would encounter. She made just such a mistake some 
years ago in Abyssinia, and the plain of Adowa is 
still sprinkled with the bleaching bones of her anni- 
hilated army. The Itahan agents in Tripolitania had 
assured their government that, as a result of Turkish 
oppression, corruption, and overtaxation, the Turks 
were heartily dishked by the Tripolitanians — all of 
which was perfectly true. But when they went on to 
say that the Tripolitanians would welcome the expulsion 
of the Turks and the substitution of an Itahan regime, 
they overshot the mark. In other words, the Tripoli- 
tanians much preferred to be ill-treated by the Turks, 
who are their coreligionists, than to be well-treated by 
the ItaHans, who are despised unbelievers. The Ital- 
ians, having had no previous experience with Moslem 
peoples, landed at TripoU with every expectation of be- 
ing welcomed as saviours by the native population. It 
is quite true that the natives gave the Itahans an ex- 
ceedingly warm reception — with rifles and machine 
guns. Here, then, were some sixty thousand Itahan 
soldiers, who had anticipated about as much trouble in 
taking Tripohtania as we should in taking Hayti, in- 

95 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

stead of being permitted to play the jaunty and pictur- 
esque roles of deliverers from oppression, being forced 
to battle desperately for their lives against the very 
people whom they had come to save and civilise. It 
was a graphic instance of the workings of Mohammedan- 
ism. How ELitchener and Cromer, those two grim men 
who have had more experience than any other Euro- 
peans in fighting and governing Mohammedans, must 
have smiled to themselves when they read the Italian 
statements that the taking of Tripolitania meant only 
a campaign of a fortnight. 

To comprehend thoroughly the peculiar situation in 
which Italy finds herself, you should understand that 
the portly, sleepy-eyed, good-natured old gentleman 
who theoretically rules Turkey under the title of Mo- 
hammed V is, politically speaking, as much a dual per- 
sonality as Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde. As Sultan of Tur- 
key, or, to give him his proper title. Emperor of the 
Ottomans, he is the nominal ruler of some twenty-four 
millions of divided, discontented, and disgruntled Turk- 
ish subjects — Osmanlis, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, 
Circassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Jews— and in that ca- 
pacity plays no great part in ordering the affairs of the 
world. But Mohammed V is more than Sultan of 
Turkey: he is likewise Successor of the Prophet, Com- 
mander of the Faithful, and Caliph of all Islam, and 
as such is the spiritual and temporal leader of the two 
hundred and twenty millions who compose the Moslem 
world. Nor is there any way of disassociating the two 
offices. In making war on the Sultan of Turkey, there- 

96 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

fore, Italy automatically made war on the chief of all 
Mohammedans, thus shaking her fist in the face not 
alone of a nation but of a religion — and the most mili- 
tant and fanatical of all religions at that. There is not 
a wearer of turban or tarboosh between the Gold Coast 
and the China coast, be he Hausa, Tuareg, Berber, 
Moor, Algerian, Tunisian, Tripolitanian, Egyptian, 
Sudanese, Somali, Arab, Kurd, Turk, Circassian, Per- 
sian, Turkoman, Afghan, Sikh, Indian, Malay, or Moro. 
who does not regard Italy's aggression in Tripolitania 
as an affront to himself and to his faith. 

Among all Moslems there is growing an ominous 
unrest, a fierce consciousness that the lands which they 
have for centuries regarded as their own are gradually 
slipping from them, and a decision that they must fight 
or disappear. On the Barbary coast, the Nile, the 
Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi they see the turbans 
and the tarbooshes retreating before the white helmets' 
implacable advance, and now they see even the Otto- 
man throne, to them a great throne, shaking under the 
pressure. Hence there is not a Moslem in the world 
to-day who will remain indifferent to any action which 
hints at the dismemberment of Turkey, for he knows 
full well that the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the 
political fortunes of Islam are inextricably interwoven. 

That Italy can hold the Tripolitanian coast towns 
as long as her ammunition, her patience, and her pubHc 
purse hold out, no one acquainted with the conditions 
of modern warfare will attempt to deny. Unless, how- 
ever, the miHtant section of Islam, of which this region 

97 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

is the very focus, can be induced to acquiesce in an 
Italian occupation, the life of an Italian soldier who ven- 
tures out of range of his war-ships' guns will not be 
worth an hour's purchase. Hordes of fanatical, des- 
ert-bred Arabs, inured to hardship, deadly sun, scanty 
food, and dearth of water, mounted on swift camels and 
as familiar with the trackless desert as the woodsman is 
with the forest in which he works, ablaze with a reli- 
gion which assures them that the one sure way to para- 
dise is to die in battle with the unbelievers, can harass 
the Italian army of occupation for years to come by a 
guerilla warfare. Even though Turkey agrees to sur- 
render Tripolitania and to withdraw her garrisons from 
that province, Italy will still have far from smooth sail- 
ing, for the simple reason that she is- not fighting Turks 
alone, but Moslems, and, as a result of her ill-advised 
slaughter of the Arabs, she has made the Moslem popu- 
lation of Tripolitania permanently hostile. Most signif- 
icant of all, the Arab resistance to an Italian advance 
into the interior of the country will be directed, con- 
trolled, and financed by that sinister and mysterious 
power known as the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh. 

To American ears the word "Senussiyeh" doubt- 
less conveys but little meaning, but to the French ad- 
ministrateurs in Algeria and Tunisia, and to the officers 
of the Mihtary Intelligence Department in Egypt and 
the Sudan, it is a word of ominous import. Though the 
Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh is, without much doubt, 
the most powerful organisation of its kind in the world, 
so complete is the veil of secrecy behind which it works 

98 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

that comparatively little is definitely known as to its 
designs, ramifications, and resources. Briefly, it is a 
secret Moslem society, organised about a century ago 
by an Algerian dervish, Mohammed ben Ali ben Es 
Senussi, from whom it takes its name; its object is the 
restoration of the Mohammedan rehgion to its original 
purity, austerity, and political power, the first step 
toward which is the expulsion of the Christian from 
Moslem lands; its initiated members, scattered through- 
out the Mohammedan world, have been variously 
estimated at from five to fifteen millions; the present 
grand master of the order, Senussi Ahmed-el-Sherif, 
the third of the succession, is admittedly a man of 
exceptional intelHgence, resource, and sagacity; his 
monastic court at Jof, in the oasis of Kufra, five hun- 
dred miles, as the camel goes, south of Benghazi and 
about the same distance from the Nile, is the capital 
of a power whose boundaries are the boundaries of 
Islam. 

It is no secret that the growing power of the 
Senussiyeh is causing considerable concern to the mili- 
tary and political officials of those European nations 
that have possessions in North Africa, for, in addition 
to the three-hundred-odd zawias, or monasteries, scat- 
tered along the African littoral from Egypt to Morocco, 
the long arm of the order reaches down to the mysteri- 
ous oases which dot the Great Sahara, it embraces the 
strange tribes of the Tibesti highlands, it controls the 
robber Tuaregs and the warlike natives who occupy 
the regions adjacent to Lake Tchad, and is, as the 

99 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

French and British have discovered, a power to be reck- 
oned with in the protected states of Kanem, Sokoto, 
Bagirmi, Bornu, and Wadai. 

The organisation of the order is both strong and 
simple. The khuan, or brothers, whose names are care- 
fully recorded in the books of the mother lodge at Jof , 
owe unquestioning obedience to the mokaddem, or pre- 
fect, in charge of the district to which they belong. 
Each mokaddem has under his orders a corps of secret 
agents, known as wekils, whose duty is to keep him con- 
stantly in touch with all that is going on in his district 
and to communicate his instructions to the brothers. 
On Grand Bairam — the Mohammedan Easter — the 
mokaddems meet in conclave at Jof, on which occasion 
the spiritual and political condition of the order is dis- 
cussed and its course of action decided on for the en- 
suing year. Above the mokaddems, and acting as an 
intermediary between them and the veiled and sacred 
person of the Senussi himself, is a cabinet of viziers, who, 
by means of a remarkable system of camel couriers, are 
enabled to keep constantly in touch with all the districts 
of the order. 

At Jof, from which no European investigator has 
ever returned, are centred all the threads of this vast 
organism. There is kept the war-chest of the order, 
constantly increased by large and small contributions 
from true believers all over the world, for every member 
of the Senussiyeh who has a total income of more than 
twenty dollars a year must contribute two and one half 
per cent of it to the order annually; there the Senussi 

lOO 



THE ITAI.IAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

has established depots of stores and war material and 
factories for the manufacture, or rather the assembling, 
of modern fire-arms; thither come to him from the ob- 
scure harbours of the Tripolitanian coast cargoes of arms 
and ammunition; thither flock pilgrims from North and 
West Africa, from the Niger and from the Nile, to re- 
ceive his orders and to seek his blessing; there is cen- 
tred one of the most remarkable secret-service systems 
in the world, its agents not alone in every corner of the 
Mohammedan world, but Hkewise keeping their fingers 
ever on the political pulse of Europe. 

A place better fitted for its purpose than Jof it 
would be hard to imagine. Here, surrounded by in- 
hospitable desert, with wells a long day's camel-ride 
apart, and the route known only to experienced and 
loyal guides, the Senussi has been free to educate, drill, 
and arm his disciples, to accumulate great stores of 
arms and ammunition, and to push forward his propa- 
ganda of a regenerated and reinvigorated Islam, with- 
out any possibility of interference from the Christian 
nations. There seems to be but little doubt that fac- 
tories have been erected at Jof for the assembling of 
weapons of precision, the materials for which have been 
systematically smuggled across the Mediterranean from 
Greece and Turkey for years past. Strange as it may 
sound, these factories are under the direction of skilled 
engineers and mechanics, for so well laid are the plans 
of the order that it annually sends a number of Moslem 
youths to be educated in the best technical schools of 
Europe. Upon completing their courses of instruction 

lOI 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

they return to Jof , or other centres of Senussiyeh activ- 
ity, to place their trained services at the disposal of the 
order, others being sent Europeward to be educated in 
their turn. The Senussiyeh's mihtary affairs are equally 
well organised, the Arabs, than whom there is admit- 
tedly no finer fighting material in the world, being in- 
structed along European lines, modified for desert war- 
fare, by veteran drill-masters who have learned their 
trade in the native armies of England and France. 
The nucleus of this mobile and highly effective force is, 
so I am told by French officials in Africa, an admirably 
mounted and equipped camel corps of five thousand 
men which the Senussi keeps always on a war footing in 
the Kufra oases. These facts in themselves prove defi- 
nitely that it would be no sporadic resistance, but a vast, 
organised movement, armed with improved weapons, 
trained by men who learned their business under Euro- 
pean drill-masters, and directed by a high intelligence, 
with which Italy would have to reckon should she at- 
tempt the hazardous experiment of an advance in the 
real hinterland of Tripolitania. 

Let me make it perfectly clear that the grand mas- 
ter of the Senussiyeh is a man of altogether exceptional 
ability. Under his direction the order has advanced 
with amazing strides, for he is a remarkable organiser 
and administrator, two qualities rarely found among 
the Arabs. The destruction of the Mahdi and of the 
KhaHfa, and the more recent dethronement of Abdul- 
Hamid, resulted in bringing a large accession of force 
to his standard by the extinction of all religious author- 

I02 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

ity ill Africa except his own. Though the Sultan of 
Turkey is, as I have said, the titular head of the Moslem 
religion, and is venerated as such wherever praying-rugs 
are spread, the chief of this militant order is undoubt- 
edly regarded by the average Mohammedan as the most 
actively powerful figure, if not as the saviour, of Islam. 
The first Senussi was powerful enough to excommuni- 
cate the Sultan Abdul-Medjid from the order because of 
his intimacy with the European powers; the father of 
the present Khedive of Egypt was accustomed to ad- 
dress the second Senussi in such terms as a disciple 
would use to a prophet, while Abbas Hilmi II, the 
reigning Khedive, a few years ago journeyed across the 
Libyan desert to pay his respects to the present head 
of the order. 

Those who are in a position to know whereof they 
speak beheve that the Senussiyeh would actively op- 
pose any attempt on the part of the Italians to occupy 
the hinterland of Tripolitania, for it is obvious that such 
an occupation would not alone bring the Christian in 
dangerous proximity to the chief stronghold of the order, 
but it would effectually cut off the suppHes of arms and 
ammunition which caravans in the pay of the Senussi- 
yeh have regularly been transporting to Jof from ob- 
scure ports on the Tripohtanian coast. It has been the 
poHcy of the Senussiyeh, supported by the Turkish 
administration in Tripolitania, to close the regions 
under its control to Christians, so it is scarcely likely 
that it would do other than resist an Italian penetra- 
tion of the country, even in the face of a Turkish 

103 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

evacuation. Though the order encouraged resistance 
to the French advance in the Sudan, considering that 
the extension of the French sphere of influence threat- 
ened its own prestige in those regions, it has, as a rule, 
refrained from displaying antagonism toward the rulers 
of the adjoining regions. Aside from proselytism, the 
Senussiyeh has performed a great work in the Sahara 
in the colonisation and cultivation of the oases, the en- 
couragement of trade, the building of rest-houses, the 
sinking of wells, and the protection of trans-Saharan 
caravans. 

Stripped of the glamour and exaggeration with 
which sensational writers and superficial travellers have 
invested the subject, it is apparent that the Senussi 
controls a very wide-spread and powerful organisation 
— an organisation probably unique in the world. As 
a fighting element his followers are undoubtedly far 
superior to the wild and wretchedly armed tribes- 
men who charged the British squares so valorously at 
Abu Klea and Omdurman and who wiped out an Ital- 
ian army in the Abyssinian hills. Their remarkable 
mobility, their wonderful powers of endurance, their 
large supplies of the swift and hardy racing-camel 
known as hegin, and their marvellous knowledge of this 
great, inhospitable region, coupled with the fact that 
they can always retreat to their bases in the desert, 
where civilised troops cannot follow them, are all ad- 
vantages of which the Senussi and his followers are 
thoroughly aware. 

Although the Senussi is, as I have shown, amply 
104 



THE ITALIAN ''WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

capable of causing the Italians serious trouble, it is very 
unlikely that he will prove actively hostile if they re- 
frain from encroaching upon those remote regions which 
he looks upon as his own. Italy will have her hands 
full with the development of the coastal regions for 
many years to come, so, if she is wise, she will leave the 
interior of the country severely alone, recognise the 
rehgious authority of the Senussi, and, if possible, effect 
some such working agreement with him as England has 
done with an equally dangerous neighbour, the Amir of 
Afghanistan. 

From the ghmpses which I have given you of the 
inhospitable character of TripoHtania and the still more 
inhospitable people who inhabit it, it will be seen that 
Italy's task does not end with the ousting of the Turk. 
She has set her hand to the plough, however, and started 
it upon a long and arduous and very costly furrow, the 
end of which no man can see. For a nation to have a 
colony, or colonies, wherein she can turn loose the over- 
flow of her population and still keep them under her 
own flag, is an undeniable asset, particularly when the 
colony is as accessible from the mother country as Libya* 
(for we must accustom ourselves to the new name sooner 
or later) is from Italy. But if Italy is to be a success as 
a colonising nation she must school herself to do things 
differently in Tripohtania from what she has in her other 
African dependencies of Eritrea and Itahan SomaHland. 

First and foremost, she must pick the men who are 
to settle her new colony as carefully as she picks the men 

* The Italians have given their new possession the historic name of Libya. 

105 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

for her carabinieri, choosing them with a view to their 
intelligence, industry, energy, and sobriety, for to flood 
TripoHtania with such a class of emigrants as every 
vessel from Italy dumps on our hospitable shores is 
but to invite disaster. 

Secondly, she must impress on these colonists the 
imperative necessity of keeping on friendly terms with 
the natives, who are, after all, the real owners of the 
soil, and of obtaining their co-operation in the develop- 
ment of the country. The Arab, remember, unlike the 
negro, cannot be bullied and domineered with impunity, 
Germany's African colonies providing significant exam- 
ples of the failures which invariably result from ill- 
treatment of the native population. 

Thirdly, there must be no "absentee landlordism," 
the future of the colony largely depending, to my way 
of thinking, upon frugal, hard-working peasant farm- 
ers, owning their own farms, whose prosperity will thus 
be indissolubly Unked with that of the colony. 

Lastly, all local questions of administration should 
be taken entirely out of the hands of Rome and left to 
"the man on the spot," for history is filled with the 
chronicles of promising colonies which have been ship- 
wrecked on the rocks of a highly centraHsed form of 
government. 

If the Italians will take these things to heart, I be- 
lieve that their conquest of TripoHtania will prove, in 
the end, for the country's own best good, contributing 
to its peace and to the welfare of its inhabitants, native 
as well as foreign, and that it will promote the opening 

io6 



THE ITALIAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 

up of the dark places to civilisation, if not to Christi- 
anity—for the Moslem does not change his faith. When, 
therefore, aU is said and done, I cannot but feel that the 
cross of the House of Savoy portends more good to 
Africa in general, and to Tripohtania in particular, than 
would ever the star and crescent. 



107 



CHAPTER V 
THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

THIS is the story of how a handful of white men 
jerked a nation out of the desert and the depths 
of despair, as though by its collar, set it on its feet, and 
taught it to play the game. It is the story of how 
northeast Africa — a region which God had seemingly 
forgotten — has been transformed into a prosperous and 
self-respecting country by giving it two things which it 
had always needed and had never known — justice and 
water. It is the chronicle of a thirty years' struggle, 
under disheartening conditions, against overwhelming 
odds, and when you have finished it you will agree with 
me, I think, that it is one of the wonder-tales of history. 
It is a drama in which English officials and Egyptian 
pashas and Arab sheikhs all have their greater or their 
lesser parts, and it is as full of romance and intrigue 
and treachery and fighting as any moving-picture play 
that was ever thrown upon a screen. 

To my way of thinking, the rescue and rehabihta- 
tion of the Nile country is the most convincing proof 
of England's genius as a colonising nation. That you 
may be able to judge, by comparison, what she has 
accomplished, you must go back a third of a century or 
so, to the days when Ismail Pasha — he with the brow of 
a statesman and the chin of a libertine — still sat on the 

io8 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

throne of the Pharaohs, wielding an extravagant, vacil- 
lating, and ineffectual rule over a region which stretched 
from the Mediterranean seaboard southward to Uganda 
and the sleeping-sickness, and from the Red Sea shore 
westward until it lost itself in the sand wastes of the 
Great Sahara. Of the one milhon three hundred and 
fifty thousand square miles at that time included within 
the Egyptian borders, less than five thousand were 
cultivated land; the rest was yellow desert and nothing 
more. The seven millions of blacks and browns who 
composed the population were so poor that the dwellers 
in the slums of Whitechapel were affluent when com- 
pared to them; they Hved, for the most part, in wretched 
hovels of sun-dried mud scattered along the banks of 
the Nile, maintaining a hand-to-mouth existence by 
raising a low grade of cotton on a few feddans of land 
which they irrigated by hand, at an appalling cost of 
time and labour, with water drawn up in buckets from 
the river. As a result of the corvee, or system of forced 
labour on pubhc works which prevailed, a large part of 
the population was virtually in a state of slavery; the 
taxes, which were unjustly assessed and incredibly ex- 
orbitant, could only be collected with the aid of the 
kourbash, as the terrible whip of rhino hide used by the 
slave-dealers was known. Barring the single Hne of 
ramshackle railway which connected Cairo with Alex- 
andria and with the Suez Canal, the only means of 
transportation were the puffing river-boats and the 
plodding caravans. The unpaid and ill-disciplined 
army was a synonym for cowardice, as proved by its 

109 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

defeats by the tribesmen of Abyssinia and the Sudan. 
The Khedive was a profligate and a spendthrift; his 
ministers and governors were cruel, dishonest, and 
tyrannical; the national resources had been dissipated 
in a veritable debauch of extravagance and corruption. 
I doubt, indeed, if the sun ever shone on a more deca- 
dent, demoraHsed, and discouraged nation than was 
Egypt on that June day in 1879, when a cablegram 
from Constantinople, addressed, significantly enough, 
to "Ismail Pasha, ex-Khedive of Egypt," brought the 
Sultan's demand for his immediate abdication in favour 
of his son Tewfik. Called to a heritage of bankruptcy 
and wide-spread discontent, the new ruler, anxious 
though he undoubtedly was to use his prerogatives 
for his people's good, found himself forced to decide 
between European intervention and native rebellion. 
The question was decided for him, however, for, in the 
spring of 1882, Arabi and his lawless soldiery broke 
loose and overran the land. 

Whether this Arabi Pasha was at heart a patriot or 
a plunderer is a question which has never been satisfac- 
torily decided, nor is it one which particularly concerns 
us, although, if you ever happen to find yourself at 
Kandy, in the hills of Ceylon, where he still lives in 
exile, I would recommend you to call upon him, for he 
will receive you with marked hospitahty and will talk 
to you quite frankly about those stirring events in which 
he played so prominent a part. As this is a story of the 
present, rather than of the past, suffice it to say that 
Arabi, then an officer in the Egyptian army, instigated 

no 




Dunce of Nuba women, Kordofan. 




Shilluk warriors, Blue Nile. 




Bread-makiriK in the Lado Enclave, Sudan. 
WORK AND PLAY IN BLACK MAN'S AFRICA. 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

a military revolt which had as its object the ending 
of European influence in the affairs of Egypt. So 
rapidly did this propaganda of "Egypt for the Egyp- 
tians!" spread among the lower classes of the popula- 
tion, and so perilous became the position of foreigners 
resident in the country, that, upon Alexandria being 
captured and looted by the revolutionists, a British 
squadron bombarded and partially destroyed that city, 
while a British army, hurried from Malta for the pro- 
tection of the Canal, in which England held the dom- 
inating interest, dispersed Arabi's forces at Tel-el-Kebir, 
pushed on across the desert to Cairo, stamped out the 
remaining embers of the revolt, and restored in a meas- 
ure the authority of the Khedive, though not without 
taking the precaution of surrounding him with British' 
" advisers" and garrisoning his cities with British troops. 
Such, in tabloid form, is the story of the beginnings of 
British domination in the land of the Valley of the Nile. 
In view of the chaotic condition of the country, 
England naturally decided that the only way to insure 
the safety of her subjects, as well as of her great financial 
and pohtical interests in that region, was to continue 
the mihtary occupation of Egypt, for the time being at 
least, and boldly to begin the task of its financial, 
judicial, pohtical, and mihtary reconstruction. The 
form of government which has resulted is, I suppose, 
the most extraordinary in the history of nations. 

Nominally a province of the Turkish Empire, and 
administered by a viceroy who theoretically derives his 
power from the Turkish sovereign, Egypt is autono- 



III 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

mous (so far as Turkey is concerned), though it still pays 
annual tribute of about three milHon five hundred thou- 
sand dollars to the Sultan. Though the title " khedive " 
means sovereign or king, without quahfication or limita- 
tion, the real ruler of Egypt is not his Highness Abbas 
Hilmi II, but his Britannic Majesty's Agent and Con- 
sul- General — at present Lord KLitchener of Khartoum 
— who, though officially Britain's diplomatic representa- 
tive in Egypt and nothing more, in reality exercises al- 
most unlimited authority and power. In other words, 
England has assumed the position of a receiver for 
Egypt's foreign creditors and has apparently made 
the receivership — ^which has never been agreeable to 
the khedivial government — a permanent one. Egypt's 
situation might, indeed, be quite aptly compared to a 
railway system which has been forced into bankruptcy 
by the extravagant methods of its directors, and one of 
whose largest creditors has become receiver with full 
power to reorganise the system for its stockholders' and 
its creditors' best good. 

Another feature of Egypt's complex form of govern- 
ment is the International Debt Commission, which con- 
sists of delegates from England, France, Germany, 
Austria, Russia, and Italy, who are stationed at Cairo 
for the purpose of keeping an eye on the national reve- 
nues and periodically collecting a share of them, over 
and above the actual running expenses of the govern- 
ment, to pay the interest on the Egyptian bonds held 
in those countries. 

To this administrative medley must be added the 

112 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

complications caused by the Ottoman Capitulations — 
by which fourteen foreign governments, including our 
own, exercise almost sovereign rights in Egypt, the 
International Tribunals, or "Mixed Courts," in the 
control of which Egypt has almost nothing to say, giv- 
ing them complete jurisdiction in all civil cases in which 
ahens may be involved with each other or with Egyp- 
tians, while the foreign consuls possess absolute author- 
ity in criminal cases where their nationals are concerned. 
The Capitulations, many of which date back to the 
early days of Turkish power, are nothing less than guar- 
antees to foreigners within the Ottoman dominions of 
full and complete immunity from the laws governing 
Turkish subjects. No reciprocal obligation was con- 
stituted by a Capitulation (which, by the way, means 
the instrument containing the terms of an agreement), 
as it was intended to be a purely gratuitous concession 
granted to Christians, by virtue of which they were 
tolerated upon the soil of Islam. Though the Capitula- 
tions were never regarded by the Turks as treaties — 
it being obvious that the Commander of the Faithful, 
who is Ukewise the Successor of the Prophet and the 
Shadow of Allah, could never treat a Christian ruler as 
an equal — they have all the character and force of 
treaties nevertheless, inviolability of domicile, freedom 
from taxation of every sort, and immunity from arrest 
for any offence whatsoever being but items in the com- 
prehensive promise not to molest the foreigner. In 
short, the Capitulations give to the nations possessing 
them as complete jurisdiction over their citizens as 

"3 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

they exercise at home, the Egyptian Government being 
powerless to lay so much as a finger on a foreigner who 
breaks its laws. 

Should an American sailor, for example, become in- 
volved in a drunken affray, as sometimes happens, and 
wound or kill an Egyptian, the Egyptian police would 
no more arrest him than they would the Khedive. 
They would merely keep him under surveillance, mean- 
while notifying the American consul, who would de- 
spatch his kavasses, as the armed guards which are at- 
tached — also by virtue of the Capitulations — to the 
various consulates are called, to effect the man's ar- 
rest. He would then be tried by the consul, who pos- 
sesses magisterial powers, before a jury drawn from 
American residents or tourists, and, if found guilty, 
would be confined in one of the several consular prisons 
which the United States maintains in the Turkish Em- 
pire, although, if the sentence were a long one, he would 
probably be sent to a prison in this country to serve 
it out. 

Though the Egyptian poHce may be perfectly aware 
that Georgios Miltiades runs a roulette game in the 
back room of his cafe, and keeps a disorderly house up- 
stairs, he can lounge in his doorway and jeer at them 
with perfect safety for the simple reason that he is a 
Greek subject, and therefore his cafe is as much on 
Greek soil as though it were in the Odos Ammonia in 
Athens, his consul alone possessing the right to enter it, 
to cause his arrest, and to inflict imprisonment or fine. 

Notwithstanding the fact that the importation of 
114 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

hasheesh into Egypt is strictly prohibited, the govern- 
ment making every effort to stamp out its use by the 
natives, the Itahan smuggler who drops anchor in 
Alexandria harbour with a cargo of it aboard knows per- 
fectly well that the arm of the Egyptian law is not long 
enough to reach him. If, however, he is caught by the 
local pohce in the act of taking the contraband ashore, 
it will be confiscated, though he himself can be arrested 
and punished only by the Itahan consular official resi- 
dent at that port. 

As a result of the privileges granted to foreigners 
by the Capitulations, the consuls stationed in Egypt, as 
well as in other parts of the Turkish Empire, are vir- 
tually the governors of their respective colonies, pos- 
sessing powers which cause their wishes to be respected 
and their orders obeyed. They are expected to keep a 
watchful eye on the doings of their nationals, especially 
those who keep saloons, dance-halls, or cafes; to settle, 
either in or out of court, their quarrels and even their 
domestic disputes; to inspect the sanitary condition of 
their houses; to perform the marriage service for those 
who prefer a civil to a rehgious ceremony; and to 
attend to their burial and the administration of their 
estates when they die. It is scarcely necessary to add 
that, as a result of this anomalous state of affairs, there 
is constant friction and frequent conflicts of authority 
between the foreign consuls and the local authorities. 
So jealously, indeed, do the foreign powers guard the 
privileges conferred upon them by the Capitulations, 
that Cairo can have no modem drainage system because 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

certain of the European governments refuse to give the 
Egyptian sanitary inspectors permission to enter the 
houses of their subjects. 

In matters of personal law, such as marriage, di- 
vorce, guardianship, succession, and the like, foreigners 
are, in general, subject to their own patriarchs or other 
religious heads, while similar questions are decided for 
the natives by the native courts known as MehkemmehSj 
which are presided over by the Cadis. In other matters 
Egyptians are justiciable before the ordinary native 
tribunals, which now consist of forty-six summary 
courts having civil jurisdiction in matters up to two 
thousand five hundred dollars in value and criminal 
jurisdiction in offences punishable by a fine or by im- 
prisonment up to three years; seven central tribunals, 
each of the chambers of which consists of three judges; 
and a court of appeals at Cairo, about half of whose 
members are European. Since its reorganisation, the 
native Egyptian bench has won an enviable record for 
honesty, energy, and efiSiciency, and would, if granted 
complete jurisdictional powers, prove a great influence 
for good in the land. 

So far as the Khedive is concerned, he has about as 
much to say in the direction of the government as the 
child Emperor of China had before the revolution put a 
president in his stead. Not only is Abbas Hilmi sur- 
rounded by English secretaries and advisers, without 
whose permission he may scarcely change his mind, 
but he is compelled to yield to England even in choos- 
ing the members of his ministry, the one or two attempts 

ii6 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

which he has made to assert his right to independence 
of action in this respect having been met by England 
with a mihtary demonstration in the streets of his capi- 
tal which was not abated until the office was filled by 
an Eg}TDtian satisfactory to the British Consul-General. 

Some years ago, when that grim old statesman, 
Lord Cromer, was still deus ex machina in Egypt, the 
Khedive, emboldened by the rapid spread of the Na- 
tionaHst movement, which has for its slogan "Egypt 
for the Eg}''ptians ! " flatly declined to give a cabinet 
portfolio to a certain Egyptian politician whose appoint- 
ment had been urged by the British Consul-General and 
who was notoriously a British tool. The following 
morning Lord Cromer drove to the Abdin Palace and 
demanded an audience with the ELhedive. There were 
no euphemisms employed in the interview which en- 
sued. 

"I have come to obtain your Highness's signature 
to this decree," announced Lord Cromer, in the blimt 
and aggressive manner so characteristic of him. 

"Suppose, my lord," the ELhedive asked quietly, 
"that I decline to make an appointment which is not 
for the good of Egypt — what then?" 

"Then, your Highness," said Cromer menacingly, 
"Ceylon." 

"But suppose, my lord," Abbas Hilmi again in- 
quired, his face pale with anger, "that I disregard your 
threat to exile me to Ceylon and still refuse to sign this 
commission?" 

Lord Cromer strode across the room to a window 
117 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

which commanded a view of Abdin Square and threw 
back the curtain. "Will your Highness look out of 
this window before you give me a final answer?" he 
asked. 

The Khedive stepped to the window and looked 
down. There, drawn up in motionless ranks which 
stretched from end to end of the great square, was a 
brigade of British infantry, the Egyptian sun blazing 
down on the rows of brown helmets, on the business-like 
uniforms of khaki, and on the slanting lines of steel. 
For five full minutes Abbas Hilmi stood in silence, 
looking down on that grim display of power. Then he 
turned slowly to Lord Cromer. "Give me the pen," 
he said. 

Here is another example of the harshness of the 
attitude which England has seen fit to adopt in her 
dealings with the Egyptian sovereign. In the days 
when Lord Kitchener, fresh from his triumphs in 
the Sudan, was still Sirdar of the Egyptian army, the 
Khedive announced that he would utilise the occasion 
of his approaching visit to Khartoum to review the 
troops of the garrison. For hours the sinewy, brown- 
faced soldiery marched and countermarched before the 
Khedive on the field of Omdurman. The infantry in 
their sand-coloured uniforms swept by with the swing 
of veterans; the field batteries — the same that had 
mown down the Mahdi's fanatic tribesmen — rumbled 
by at a gallop; the camel corps, the riders swaying on 
their strange mounts like vessels in a gale, paced past; 
then the cavalry came, as fast as the horses could lay 




The real ruler of Egypt, His Excellency Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, British Apent and 
Consul-GeneraUn Egypt, inspecting a guard of honour upon his recent visit to the battle-field of 
Omdurman. 




" killitiH-n riiarlf from mud." A march past of Sudanese infantry. 
THE SAVIOUR OV THE SUDAN AND SOME OF THOSE HE SAVED. 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

foot to ground, lances levelled, the troopers cheering 
like madmen, thundering past the reviewing party in a 
whirlwind of colour and dust and noise. It was a fine 
exhibition and one of which any commanding officer 
might well have been proud, but the Khedive had re- 
ceived his military education in Austria, where faultless 
alignment and the abihty to execute intricate parade 
movements are reckoned among the first requisites of 
a soldier; so when Lord Kitchener, the conqueror of the 
Sudan and the maker of the Egyptian army, reined up 
his charger before him, saluted, and perfunctorily asked, 
''I trust that your Highness is satisfied with the dis- 
cipline and appearance of your forces?" Abbas Hilmi, 
probably as much from a spirit of hostility to the Eng- 
lish as for any other reason, answered in a voice loud 
enough to be heard by all around him, "They are a fine 
body of men. Lord Kitchener, but I am far from satis- 
fied with their discipline. " Officers who witnessed this 
incident have told me that Lord Kitchener was as 
amazed as though he had received a slap in the face. 
Within an hour his resignation as Sirdar was in the 
hands of the Khedive, who as promptly accepted it. 
But England could never permit her foremost soldier 
to be so wantonly and so pubhcly affronted, for to do 
so would be dangerously to impair her prestige among all 
classes of Egyptians. So the cable flashed a message 
from Downing Street to the British Agency in Cairo and 
a few hours later the Khedive was peremptorily in- 
formed that he could choose between apologising to 
Lord Kitchener and requesting him to withdraw his 

119 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

resignation or of abdicating in favour of his brother. 
Appreciating that it was wiser to apologise and keep his 
throne than to remain stubborn and lose it, Abbas Hilmi 
requested Kitchener to remain on as Sirdar — and he 
himself remained on as EJiedive. 

The men who really transact the business of the 
Egyptian Government are not the holders of cabinet 
portfolios, but the departmental under-secretaries, all of 
whom are English, their plans being perfunctorily sub- 
mitted to their Egyptian chiefs for their approval, 
though they would be used whether they received it 
or not. The national revenues and expenditures are 
controlled by an EngHsh financial adviser, without 
whose permission the Khedive and his ministers cannot 
spend so much as a piastre of government funds. Simi- 
larly, the ministries of the interior, of justice, of com- 
munications, and of agriculture are dictated by English 
"advisers." For upward of thirty years, in fact, the 
Nile country has been more absolutely governed from 
London than has India, or Canada, or Australia, or 
South Africa, or any of the Crown colonies, and this de- 
spite the fact that between England and Egypt there is 
no tie that is officially recognised by any foreign power. 
Now, thirty years is a considerable lapse of time any- 
where, particularly in the East, where men mature 
rapidly, so that those who were children when the Brit- 
ish came are in the prime of life now. The fact that 
in that interim England has had ample time to train 
them for the duties of governmental administration, as 
witness what we have accomplished among the Filipinos 

I20 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

in less than half that time, but that she has made httle, 
if any, effort to do so, is quite naturally taken by all 
thinking Egyptians as a proof that there is no sincerity 
back of her repeated assertions that she intends to turn 
Egypt over to them as soon as they are fitted to admin- 
ister it. In fact, I have heard responsible British offi- 
cials assert that, to their way of thinking, the natives 
were getting altogether too much education as it was, 
and that the less they were taught to think the easier it 
would be for England to hold the country. Frankly 
stated, England's attitude toward the Egyptians has 
been "You cannot go near the water until you know 
how to swim." 

Let it be perfectly clear, however, that nothing 
is farther from my intention than to intimate that 
British rule has not been beneficial to Egypt. No fair- 
minded person who was familiar with the appalling con- 
dition of the country and its people before the EngHsh 
came, and with their present state of prosperity, would 
cast so much as the shadow of a doubt on the wonderful 
improvement which has been brought about. The 
story of Egypt's rise from practical bankruptcy until 
its securities are now quoted nearly as high as Enghsh 
consols reads hke a romance of the gold fields. During 
the last few years the country has been experiencing a 
land boom equal to that of southern CaHfornia, prop- 
erty in Alexandria having sold at the rate of one hun- 
dred dollars a square yard; scientific irrigation, com- 
bined with the completion of the great dam at Assuan, 
has enormously enlarged the area of cultivation and 

Z2I 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

has made Egypt the second greatest cotton-producing 
country in the world; the national debt has been ma- 
terially reduced; and, most significant of all, Egypt's 
European bondholders have consented to have the in- 
terest on their bonds reduced from seven to three and 
a half per cent. Life and property have been made as 
safe in Port Said and Zagazig and the Fayoum as they 
are in Yonkers or Salem or New Rochelle; slavery has 
been abolished; official corruption has been rooted out; 
forced labour for public works is no longer permitted; 
an admirable system of railways brings the entire cul- 
tivated area within reach of the coast; hospitals have 
been estabhshed in all of the larger towns; while every 
phase of the pubHc health has been so closely watched 
that the population of the country has actually doubled 
in the thirty years since the English came. 

To my way of thinking, the most interesting chap- 
ter in the history of present-day Egypt is that which 
records the development of scientific irrigation. North- 
east Africa being practically rainless, its sole source of 
water supply is the Nile, this mighty river created by 
torrential rains in the mountains of Abyssinia and by 
the overflow of equatorial lakes, and which is without 
tributaries in Egypt proper, having an overflow which 
varies with the seasons. For four months the flood 
rushing seaward, which is known as "high Nile," en- 
riches hundreds of square miles of what would other- 
wise be arid and worthless land. Then come eight 
months of low Nile, which, were it not for the genius 
of an English engineer, would mean unwatered fields, 

122 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

scanty crops, and probably famine. The British ad- 
ministrators, appreciating from the very outset that 
Egypt's entire future depended upon its agricultural 
prosperity, and that this, in turn, depended upon the 
fcUahecn having an ample and steady supply of water 
for their farms, set their engineers at the task of devis- 
ing some scheme for compelling the great river to pay 
tribute to the land through which it passed instead 
of wasting its fertilising waters in the Mediterranean. 
Hence the great barrage at Assuan, suggested by Sir 
William Willcocks, designed by Sir Benjamin Baker, 
built by Sir John Aird, and financed by Sir Ernest 
Cassel. A mile and a quarter long, containing a mil- 
Hon tons of stone and creating a reservoir three times 
the area of the Lake of Geneva, this titanic barrier per- 
mits the additional irrigation of one miUion six hundred 
thousand acres of land. Though its cost was twelve 
miUion five hundred thousand dollars, it has already 
increased the earning power of Egypt fully thirteen 
million dollars annually, so it will be seen that it more 
than pays for itself to the country every twelvemonth. 
The systematic hberation, during the burning summer 
months, of the water thus conserved, means unfailing 
prosperity for Egypt, for it is almost unbehevable, to 
one who has not seen it with his own eyes, what agri- 
cultural magic water can work in this naturally fertile 
soil. As the regions capable of responding to irrigation 
are almost boundless, and as the water supply is almost 
inexhaustible, and as the engineers — and, what is far 
more important, the financiers — have come to appreci- 

123 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

ate that the pregnant soil can be made to pay for the 
cost of any reservoir, or series of reservoirs, which they 
may construct, it is only reasonable to assume that the 
great dam at Assuan is but the forerunner of many 
others, so that eventually the Valley of the Nile will be 
white with cotton and yellow with grain from the Delta 
to* the Sudd. 

But if Upper Egypt suffers from being too dry, 
Lower Eg5rpt suffers from being too wet. The pros- 
perity of the country, remember, depends almost en- 
tirely upon its cotton crop, which has an approximate 
value of one hundred million dollars annually, the 
cotton fields covering some one million six hundred 
thousand acres, most of which are in the Delta. That 
this source of revenue may be increased, the Egyptian 
Government has recently undertaken a huge drainage 
project, which will, it is estimated, when completed in 
191 5, redeem a great tract of flooded and hitherto 
worthless land, bringing a milHon additional acres under 
cultivation, almost doubling the production of cotton, 
and, incidentally, draining Lake Mariout, that historic 
body of water disappearing forever. 

Agriculture and its attendant problems of irriga- 
tion and fertiUsation constitute the sole hobby and 
amusement of the present Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II, 
and, consequently, he is keenly interested in anything 
that pertains to it, being a ready and Hberal purchaser 
of all improved types of agricultural machinery; which 
he puts to practical use on the great estates which he 
owns near Alexandria, in the Delta, and in the Western 

124 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

Desert. It so happened that, while I was the consular 
representative of the United States at Alexandria, I re- 
ceived a call one morning from the president of an Amer- 
ican concern engaged in the manufacture of agricultural 
and well-drilling machinery who explained that he was 
passing through Egypt and asked if it would be possible 
for me to obtain him an audience with the Khedive. 
The request was duly transmitted to the Grand Master 
of Ceremonies, and shortly thereafter a reply reached 
me naming the day and hour when his Highness would 
receive my compatriot and myself at the palace of 
■Ras-el-Tin. Frock-coated and top-hatted, we drove to 
the palace on the day appointed, were received by the 
officials of the khedivial household, and shown into 
the salle de reception, where Abbas Hilmi stood awaiting 
us. After a cordial greeting — ^for the ELhedive makes 
no secret of his liking for Americans — he drew me down 
beside him on a small sofa, motioning my companion 
to take a chair opposite us. 

"It gives me particular pleasure," I began, "to 

present Mr. K to your Highness, particularly as 

he is an authority on agricultural machinery — a subject 
in which your Highness is, I know, considerably in- 
terested. " 

" Say, Khedive, " exclaimed my fellow-countryman, 
suddenly leaning forward and emphasising every sen- 
tence by waggling his finger under Abbas Hilmi's au- 
gust nose, "I've got the niftiest Httle proposition in 
well-drilling machinery that ever struck this burg, and 
if you don't jump at a chance to get in on the ground 

125 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

floor, then all I've got to say is that you're throwing 
away the chance of your lifetime. " 

The Khedive, being, naturally, quite unaccustomed 
to this form of verbal assault and still more unaccus- 
tomed to having any one waggle a finger under his 
nose, at first drew back haughtily; then the humour 
of the situation dawned upon him, and, as the river 
of talk which is one of the chief assets of the trained 
American salesman flowed steadily on, he became inter- 
ested in spite of himself, now and then interjecting a 
pertinent question, and terminating the audience by 
giving the American an order for several thousand dol- 
lars' worth of American machinery, which, the last I 
heard of it, was giving excellent satisfaction on the 
royal farms. 

If it is difl&cult to fix the exact legal status of Egypt, 
it is still more difficult to explain that of the Sudan, 
which is described in the official blue-books as "an 
Anglo-Egjrptian condominium. " Until 1882 the Sudan 
was as much a part of Egypt proper as Florida is a part 
of the United States, but in that year Egyptian rule was 
interrupted by the revolt of the Mahdi, who, with his 
successor the Khalifa, held the country for sixteen years 
under a bloody and desolating tyranny. In 1896 an 
Anglo-Egyptian army under Sir Herbert Kitchener be- 
gan operations for the recovery of the lost provinces, 
and, on September 2, 1898, the overthrow of the Der- 
vish power was completed on the battle-field of Omdur- 
man. In the following year the pleasing farce was pre- 

126 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

sented of a convention being signed by the British and 
Egyptian Governments (or, in other words, by Lord 
Cromer as the representative of England in Egypt and 
by Lord Cromer as the virtual dictator of Egypt) which 
provides for the administration of the territory south 
of the twenty-second parallel of latitude by a governor- 
general appointed by Egypt with the assent of England; 
and which declares that the British and Egyptian flags 
shall be used together; that laws shall be made by proc- 
lamation; that no duties shall be levied on imports 
from Egypt; and that slavery is prohibited. In view 
of England's absolute domination of Egypt, it is obvi- 
ous that the term "condominium," as applied to the 
Sudan, is a euphemism for "British possession," and 
that England controls this great region as completely as 
though her flag alone flew over it and Eling George's 
picture ornamented its stamps. 

The name Sudan is short for Beled-es-Sudan, which 
means the Land of the Blacks. Extending from the 
southern frontier of Egypt to Uganda, a distance equal 
to that from Saint Paul to New Orleans, and from the 
shores of the Red Sea to the confines of the great central 
African kingdom of Wadai, or as far as from Chicago to 
Denver, the Sudan boasts an area three times that of 
Texas. This area, prior to the Dervish oppression, had 
a population estimated at eight and a half millions, but, 
as a result of the wholesale massacres perpetrated by 
the Mahdi and his followers, it has to-day less than two 
and a half millions. Since the return of peace, however, 
the Sudan is gradually recovering from the effects of the 

127 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Dervishes' barbaric rule, during which the whole coun- 
try was depopulated, wide tracts of land went out of 
cultivation, and trade was largely abandoned. 

At present the poverty, the scanty population, and 
the lack of irrigation in the Sudan form a striking con- 
trast to the wealth, the density of population, and the 
high state of cultivation found in Egypt. But, though 
it has been, until very recently, little better than an 
abandoned estate, with practically no market value, 
the money and labour which its British proprietors are 
expending upon it are already beginning to produce 
highly promising results. As a matter of fact, the agri- 
cultural resources of this inland empire are hardly 
guessed at, for the fact is too apt to be overlooked that, 
beyond the sandy deserts which guard its northern 
frontier, there exist extensive and fertile regions which, 
in the provinces of Gezire and Sennar alone, are esti- 
mated at fifteen millions of acres. Added to this, the 
Sudan is particularly fortunate in possessing, in the Blue 
and the White Nile, two great waterways which are 
destined to prove invaluable as mediums of fertilisation 
and transportation. There is, indeed, no room for 
doubt that the Sudan is destined to be in time a great 
agricultural centre, for cotton, wheat, and sugar-cane 
are staple and give every promise of proHfic crops — 
many English experts prophesying that, when provided 
with facilities for irrigation, it will supplant the United 
States as the chief cotton-growing country of the world 
—while, farther afield, there are excellent cattle ranges 
and untold wealth in forest lands. But although much 

128 




Fighting-men of the Emir of Wadai. ("They are wearing helmets and chain mail captured by their 
Saracenic ancestors from the Crusaders. The quilted armour on the horses will turn anything 
short of a bullet.") 




A gift from .-Mi Dinar, Sultan of Darfur. to the Sirdar of the Sudan. (The Sultan of Darfur is a semi- 
independent and powerful native ruler of the Southwestern Sudan.) 



STRANGE PEOPLE KRO.M INNERMOST AFRICA. 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

money has already been spent upon the Sudan, much 
more will have to be spent before it can have more than 
a speaking acquaintance with prosperity, for none of its 
three great needs — population, irrigation, and trans- 
portation — can be provided for nothing or in a hurry, 
I was told so repeatedly by people in other and 
more favoured parts of Africa that the Sudan was noth- 
ing but a waste of sun-scorched sand, that I went there 
as much to see if the description were a true one as for 
any other reason. You don't have to search for romance 
in the Sudan; it's there waiting for you when you ar- 
rive. It met me on the station platform at Wady 
Haifa, which is the first town across the Sudanese 
frontier, in the form of a fair-haired, moon-faced, khaki- 
clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the 
tip I proffered him to secure a compartment to myself 
as insolently as the poor but virtuous heroine of the 
melodrama spurns the villain's gold. He drew back as 
though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake in 
working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; 
then, bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer 
does when he is introduced, he turned on his heel and 
strode away. " I say, you got the wrong one that time, 
old chap," remarked an EngHshman who had witnessed 
the little incident and who, judging from his pith hel- 
met and riding-breeches, was of the country. "You 
probably didn't know that you were offering a tip to a 
former captain in his German Majesty's garde du 
corps?'' I remarked that a month before a former 
general of division of the Bey of Tunis had accepted 

129 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

with marked gratitude a tip not half so large for show- 
ing me through the Palace of the Bar do. 

"Well, this Johnnie won't," was the reply. "He 
may not have much money, but he's loaded to the gun- 
wales with pride. The story of his career sounds as if 
it had served as a model for one of Ouida's novels. Re- 
fused to marry the girl his parents had picked out for 
him, so his father cut off his allowance and left him to 
shift for himself. He sent in his papers, went to Alge- 
ria, and enlisted — of all fool things ! — ^in that regiment of 
earth's hard cases called the Foreign Legion. It didn't 
take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of sol- 
diering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in 
charge of a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer 
lying in the harbour, worked his passage to Alexandria, 
enlisted in a British cavalry regiment, took part in 
Kitchener's campaign against the KhaHfa, was wounded 
in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pension. 
Now he wears a guard's uniform and carries a green 
flag and walks up and down the platform shouting 'AH 
aboard for Khartoum ! ' And at home he would have a 
coronet on his visiting-cards and spend his afternoons 
swaggering along Unter den Linden. Extraordinary 
what a man will do if he has to, isn't it? But you'll find 
lots more of the same kind in the Sudan. It's no place 
for idlers down here; every one works or gets out." 

That struck me as a pretty promising introduction 
to a country which, so I had been assured elsewhere, 
had nothing more interesting to recommend it than sun 
and sand, and it was with a marked rise in my antici- 

130 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

pations that I saw my luggage stowed away in a com- 
partment of one of the long railway carriages, which 
are painted white for the same reason that a man wears 
a white suit in the tropics, which have mndows of blue 
glass to prevent the sun-glare from injuring the passen- 
gers' eyes, and which are provided with both outside 
and inside blinds in an attempt to keep out a httle of 
the heat. Looked at from any stand-point that you 
please, the thirty hours' railway journey from Wady 
Haifa to Khartoum is far from being an enjoyable ex- 
perience, for a light in your compartment means a 
plague of flies, while any attempt to get air, other than 
that kicked up by the electric fan, means suffocating dust. 
It being too dark to read and too hot to sleep, the only 
alternative is to sit in your pajamas, swelter, and smoke. 
Considering the obstacles it has had to overcome, 
the Sudan government deserves great credit for the 
railways it has built and the trains it operates. The 
construction of the railway to Khartoum was under- 
taken by General Kitchener in 1896, in order to support 
the advance of his army, and, in spite of the difficulty 
of laying a railway line across the sandy and stony sur- 
face of the desert, the work was so energetically carried 
on that the line advanced at the rate of a mile a day. 
The most serious obstacle was, of course, the provision 
of an adequate supply of water for the engines and work- 
men, so a series of watering-stations was estabhshed, 
at which wells, sunk to a depth of eighty feet or more, 
tap the subterranean water. These stations are so far 
apart, however, that to supply the engines it is necessary 

131 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

to attach two or more tank-cars to each train. Still 
another difficulty is the shifting sand, which, during 
the period of the khamsin, or desert wind, proves as dis- 
astrous to railroading in the Sudan as snow does to the 
railroads of our own Northwest, an inch of sand throw- 
ing an engine from the rails far more effectually than a 
yard of snow. 

It was my fortune, by the way, to encounter one of 
the huhouhs, or sand-storms, for which the Sudan is 
famous. To give an adequate idea of it, however, is 
as impossible as it is to describe any other overwhelm- 
ing phenomenon of nature. Far off across the desert 
we saw it approaching at the speed of a galloping horse — 
a great fleecy, yellowish-brown cloud which looked for 
all the world like the smoke of some gigantic conflagra- 
tion. A distant humming, which sounded at first like 
the drone of a million sewing-machines, gradually rose 
into such a roar as might be made by a million motor- 
cars, and then the storm was upon us. The sand poured 
down as though shaken through a sieve; the landscape 
was blotted out; the sun was obscured and there came 
a yellow darkness, like that of a London fog; men and 
animals threw themselves, or were hurled, to the ground 
before the fury of the wind, while a mantle of sand, 
inches thick, settled upon every animate and inanimate 
thing. Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come, 
and we were left dizzy, bewildered, bhnded, half- 
strangled, and gasping for breath, amid a landscape 
which was as completely shrouded in yellow sand as an 
American countryside in winter is covered with snow. 

132 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

Under any circumstances a sand-storm is a disagreeable 
experience, but out on the desert, where the traveller's 
life frequently depends upon the plainness of the cara- 
van trails, it ofttimes brings death in its train. 

It is a gratifying comphment to American mechan- 
ical skill that the running-time between Wady Haifa 
and Khartoum has been shortened four hours by the 
recent adoption of American locomotives, which run, 
fittingly enough, over American-made rails. In the 
construction of its trains the Sudan government has 
avoided the irksome privacy of the European compart- 
ment car and the unremitting publicity of the American 
Pullman by designing a car which combines the best 
features of both. The first-class cars on the Sudanese 
express trains contain a series of coupes, each somewhat 
roomier than the drawing-room in a Pullman sleeper and 
each opening into a spacious corridor which runs the 
length of the car. For day use there is one long cush- 
ioned seat running crosswise of each compartment, 
which at night forms the lower berth, the back of the 
seat swinging up on hinges to form the upper. Each 
coupe is provided with running water, a folding table, 
two arm-chairs of wicker, and an electric fan, without 
which last, owing to the almost incredible dust which a 
train sets in motion, one would all but suffocate. At 
several stations along the Hne are well-equipped baths, 
at which the trains stop long enough for the passengers 
hurriedly to refresh themselves. 

The mention of these railway baths recalls an in- 
cident which seems amusing enough to relate. I once 

^33 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

had as a fellow-passenger on the journey from Khartoum 
northward a red-faced, white-moustached, choleric- 
tempered English globe-trotter, who was constitution- 
ally opposed to the practice of tipping, which he took 
occasion to characterise on every possible occasion as 
"An outrage — a damnable outrage, sir!" Now, at 
these wayside bath stations it has long been the accepted 
custom to give the equivalent of five cents to the silent- 
footed native who fills the tub, brings you your soap and 
towels, and brushes your garments. But this the iras- 
cible Englishman, true to his principles, refused to do, 
still further unpopularising himself by loudly cursing the 
cleanKness of the tub, the warmth of the water, the 
size of the towels, and the slowness of the Sudanese 
attendant. Five minutes before the time for the train 
to leave the whistle gave due warning and the passen- 
gers scrambled from the bath into their clothes, which 
the native attendants were accustomed to brush and 
leave outside the bath-room doors. Every one hurried 
into his clothes, as I have remarked, except the anti- 
tipping Englishman, who almost choked with blasphemy 
when he found that his garments had mysteriously dis- 
appeared. Though a hasty search was instituted, not 
a trace of them could be found, the impassive Sudanese 
stolidly declaring that they had seen nothing of the 
effendi's missing apparel. The engine shrieked its final 
warning and the laughing travellers piled aboard — all, 
that is, but the Englishman, who rushed onto the plat- 
form clad in a bath towel, only to retreat before the 
shocked glances of the women passengers. My last 

134 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

impression of that God-forsaken, sun-blistered bath 
station in the desert was the rapidly diminishing sound 
of his imprecations as he continued his fruitless search 
for his garments. There was no other train, I should 
add, for three days. Weeks later I heard that his 
clothes were eventually returned to him by a native, 
who said that he had found them, neatly folded, un- 
derneath a near-by culvert. 

Nowhere is the overpowering romance of the land 
brought more vividly before you than in the dining- 
cars or on the decks of the river steamers. The tall 
young Enghshman in flannels who sits opposite you at 
table remarks casually that he is using a four months' 
leave of absence to go up Gondokoro-way after elephant, 
and a French marquis who is sitting near by, happening 
to overhear the conversation, leans across to inquire 
about the chances for sport on the Abyssinian frontier. 
"You can't go across there, you know," interrupts a 
bimbashi, whose freckled Irish face looks strangely out 
of place beneath the tarboosh which denotes an officer 
in the Egyptian service. "The Hadendowas are on 
the rampage again and the Sirdar has issued orders that 
no one is to be permitted to cross into Menelik's terri- 
tory until things have quieted down. There's no use 
your trying it, for the camel poHce are jolly well cer- 
tain to turn you back. " The bearded man in the ill- 
fitting clothes, who would be taken almost anywhere 
for a commercial traveller, is, you are told, one of the 
most celebrated big-game shots in the world, and just 
now is on his way to the Lado Enclave in search of a 

135 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

certain rare species of antelope for the Berlin museum. 
The grizzled Egyptian officer sitting by himself — for 
the British no more mingle socially with the Egyptians 
than Americans do with negroes — once served under 
Gordon, as the bit of faded blue ribbon on the breast 
of his tunic denotes; the brown-faced Englishman in 
riding-clothes, with the wrinkles about his eyes which 
come from staring out across the sands under a tropic 
sun, is a pasha and the governor of a province as large 
as many a European kingdom, and farther up the 
line he will get off the train and disappear into the 
desert on one of his periodical tours of inspection, 
perhaps not seeing another white face for three months 
or more. It struck me that there was something par- 
ticularly fine and manly and self-reliant about these 
young Englishmen who are acting as policemen and 
judges and administrators and agricultural experts 
rolled into one, out there at the Back of Beyond. 
"It's only the hard work that makes it bearable," 
said one of them in answer to my question. "What 
with the heat and the fhes and the never-ending vista 
of yellow sand and the lack of companionship, we 
should die from sheer loneliness if we didn't work from 
dawn until bedtime. Besides, every two years we get 
long enough leave to go home. " (And oh, the caress 
in that word home.) Then he asked me with pathetic 
eagerness about the latest song-hits at the London 
music-halls, and was this new Russian dancer at Covent 
Garden as wonderful as the illustrated weeklies made her 
out, and honestly, now, did I think the government was 

136 




The "Fuzzie-Wuzzies." Hadendowa tribesmen of Suakim Province, Eastern Sudan. (Before the 
British came the Hadendowas were the most turbulent and lawless of the Sudanese tribes.) 




Troopers of the -u lanL--i: Camrl Ciirii-. 'I'lii- ri-Kl>ratecl force has lieen recruited from such tribesmen 

as those shown above. 



THE BRITISH DRILL-SERGEANT'S WORK IN THE SUDAX. 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

going to be such a bally ass as to give the Irish home 
rule? That young man — he was twenty-four on his 
last birthday, he told me — has charge of a province four 
times as large as New York State, and in it he wields a 
power which is a strange cross between the patriarchal 
and the despotic. With a score or so of camel poUce he 
maintains law and order among a population which, 
until very recent years, were as savage and intractable 
as the Sioux; he holds the high justice, the middle, and 
the low; and he is, incidentally, a practical authority on 
such varied subjects as wheat-growing, cotton-raising, 
camel-breeding, fertilising, and irrigation. Nor would 
I fail to call attention to the little-known but wonder- 
ful work of a handful of British officers, who, working 
continuously since 1898, in those fever-ridden swamps 
near Lake No, have finally succeeded in removing the 
last block of Sudd,* twenty-four miles long, thus making 
the Nile a free, navigable waterway from Khartoum to 
Rejaf, in Uganda, a distance of twelve hundred miles. 
And these young men, remember, are but isolated ex- 
amples of the thousands, in Africa, in Asia, in America, 
and in Oceanica, who are binding together Britain's 
colonial empire. 

Its discomforts notwithstanding, the railway jour- 
ney from Wady Haifa to Khartoum is filled with inter- 
est, comparing not at all unfavourably with that other 
remarkable desert journey by the Trans-Caspian rail- 
way from Krasnovodsk to Samarkand. For two hun- 
dred miles or more after leaving Wady Haifa we see 

* The name given to the dense masses of water plants which have 
lonnj obstructed the upper reaches of the Nile. 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

through the blue glass of the windows nothing but end- 
less wastes of black rocks and orange sand. Then the <' 
desert gives place to undulating sand-hills, and these in 
turn to clusters of dom-palms, to fields of barley, to 
conical acacias, and finally a fringe of palms announces 
the proximity of the river. We pass in turn Gebel 
Barka, the sacred mountain of the ancient Egyptians, 
and, at its base, the ruins of Napata, once the capital 
of an Ethiopian kingdom. A few miles south of Atbara, 
which is the junction of the railway to Port Sudan, on 
the Red Sea, we pass the so-called Islannd of Meroe, 
with its score of pyramids, beside which the majestic 
monuments of Egypt are but the creations of yesterday, 
for this region, remember, was the cradle of the Egyp- 
tian arts and sciences. In the settlements along the 
banks we now begin to see the typical round straw huts 
of Central Africa, with their pointed roofs and airy re- 
cubas, or porches. The peoples change with the sce- 
nery, the slender, tarbooshed Nubian giving way to the 
fierce-faced, shock-headed Hadendowas, that savage 
fighting-clan who hold the country between the Nile and 
the Red Sea, and they, in turn, to the Kabbabish Bed- 
ouins, those freebooters of the desert, who, perched high 
on their lean white racing camels, were the terror of 
every caravan in the days before the British came. The 
cultivated patches become thicker, the signs of civilisa- 
tion grow increasingly frequent, the train rumbles across 
a long iron bridge which spans the river, and slowing, 
comes to a halt before a long, low station building on 
which is the word "Khartoum." 

Like another Phoenix, Khartoum has risen from its 
138 




The last of the dervishes. The leader of a recent revolt in the Sudan. 




The statue of Gordon at Khartoum. '• Seated on his bronze camel, peering across the desert in search 
of the white helmets that came too late." 



THE L.\ND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER. 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

ashes on the site of that city which formed the funeral 
pyre of the heroic Gordon. The name — "elephant's 
trunk" — refers to the shape of the long peninsula on 
which the city stands and which forms the point of 
separation of the Nile into its Blue and White branches. 
It is a brand-new city which the British engineers have 
constructed; a city with a ground plan as mathemat- 
ically laid out and with streets as broad as Washing- 
ton ; a city with pavements and side- walks and gutters 
and sewers and lighting facihties on the most modern 
lines. As all the buildings are of a dust-coloured brick, 
the business portion of the city has a certain air of sub- 
stantial permanence, but so uncompromising is the 
architecture and so destitute of shade are the streets 
that it looks more like a Russian penal settlement than 
like an African capital. In the residential quarter, 
however, the picturesque has not been sacrificed to the 
utilitarian, for along the bank of the Blue Nile a splen- 
did boulevard — a sort of African Riverside Drive — has 
been constructed, and here no business or commercial 
trespass will be permitted, for from the Grand Hotel to 
the Palace, a distance of a mile or more, it is lined with 
the residences of the British officials, low-roofed, broad- 
verandaed bungalows nestling in luxuriant gardens. 
The thing that impresses one most about Khartoum 
is the extraordinary width of its streets and diagonal 
avenues and the frequency of its open circles, but the 
British will tell you quite frankly that mihtary consider- 
ations, rather than beauty, guided them in planning it 
and that a few field-guns, properly placed, can sweep the 

139 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

entire city. There are two buildings in Khartoum which 
seem to me to be more significant of the new era which 
has begun for the Sudan than all the other features of 
the city combined. One is the Gordon Memorial Col- 
lege, built with the object of training the sons of the 
Sudanese sheikhs and chieftains along those lines which 
are best calculated to make for the future peace, prog- 
ress, and prosperity of the country. With his laurels as 
the victor of Omdurman still fresh upon him. Lord 
Kitchener appealed to his countrymen for one hundred 
thousand pounds for the establishment of this institu- 
tion, which he felt that England owed to the memory of 
Gordon, and, so prompt and general was the response, 
the entire sum was subscribed within a few days. The 
other building to which I referred is the recently com- 
pleted Anglican Cathedral, which stands as a recogni- 
tion of Gordon's great work as a missionary and as an 
impressive exhibition of the advance of the Christian 
faith. Could Gordon have returned to life on the occa- 
sion of the consecration of this cathedral, and have seen 
harmoniously gathered beneath its lofty roof religious 
dignitaries of such different minds and faiths as the 
Bishop of London, the Coptic Archbishop of Alex- 
andria, the Greek Patriarch of Abyssinia, and the Grand 
Cadi and the Grand Mufti, the heads of the Mohamme- 
dan community in the Sudan, he might well have ex- 
claimed, "I did not die in vain." 

I have now sketched for you the conditions which 
prevailed in the Valley of the Nile before the English 

140 




A SMILING DAMSEL OK KORDOFAN. 
In this part of the world thcTc is no money to be made in the dressmaking business. 



THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER 

came and those which obtain there to-day. What 
its future is to be depends wholly upon the action 
of England. Were she to leave the country now, or 
within the near future, she would leave it under condi- 
tions wliich would soon result in chaos, and the good 
that she has done would be largely lost. The extensive 
schemes of irrigation upon which she has entered, and 
upon which the prosperity of this whole region so largely 
depends, could never be financed by an independent 
Egypt, and the same is true of the question of trans- 
portation, which is at the bottom of all the problems of 
economic development in the Sudan. 

That England's position in the Nile country is 
illegal and illogical her stanchest supporters do not 
attempt to deny, but those who are really familiar with 
Egyptian conditions and character will agree with me, 
I think, that Egypt could suffer no greater calamity 
than to have the English go. Not that I think that 
there is the sHghtest probabihty of their doing so, for 
Italy's aggression in Tripolitania, combined with the 
attitude of the other members of the Triple Alliance, 
has resulted in Britain strengthening, rather than re- 
laxing, her grip on Egypt and the Suez Canal. The 
canal provides, indeed, the key to the entire Egyptian 
situation, for upon her control of it depends England's 
entire scheme of administration in India and the Far- 
ther East. To withdraw her forces from Egypt would 
be tantamount to leaving the gateway to her Eastern 
possessions unguarded, and that, I am convinced, she 
will never do. Two lesser, though in themselves im- 

141 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

portant, reasons militate against her surrendering the 
control of the Valley of the Nile. One is her hope of 
eventually realising, in spite of German opposition, 
Cecil Rhodes' s dream of an "All Red" route from the 
Cape to Cairo, of which Egypt and the Sudan would be 
the northern links. The other is the belief that in the 
scientific irrigation and cultivation of the fertile Nile 
lands Ue the means of freeing British manufacturers 
from their dependence on American cotton. I am in- 
clined to beheve, therefore, that in the not far-distant 
future England will become convinced that candour is 
a better poHcy than hypocrisy, and will frankly add 
to her globe-girdhng chain of colonial possessions the 
whole of that vast region lying between the mouths of 
the Nile and the swamps of the Sudd. 



142 



CHAPTER VI 
IN ZANZIBAR 

THERE is no name between the covers of the atlas 
more redolent of romance and adventure. Ever 
since Livingstone entered the African jungle on his 
mission of proselytism; ever since Stanley entered the 
same jungle on his quest of Livingstone; and ever since 
the railway-builders began to run their levels and lay 
their rails along the trail blazed by them both, Zanzi- 
bar has been the chief gateway through which Chris- 
tianity, civilisation, and commerce have entered the 
Dark Continent. Though its area has been steadily 
lessened by spoliation, treaty, and purchase, until the 
sultanate, which once extended from Cape Guardafui to 
Delagoa Bay and inland to the Great Lakes, has dwin- 
dled to two coastwise islands in the Indian Ocean, Zanzi- 
bar the capital is still the most important place, politi- 
cally and commercially, in all East Africa, and one of 
the most picturesque and interesting cities in the world. 
It bears the impress of the many kinds of men of 
many nationaUties — Arab sultans, slave-traders and 
pirates, Portuguese merchants, European explorers, and 
ivory-hunters — who have swaggered across the pages 
of its history. Four hundred years ago Vasco da 
Gama's exploring caravels dropped anchor in its har- 
bour, and the architecture of the city is still Portuguese; 

143 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

a century later the dhows of the piratical sultans of 
Muskat swooped down, giving to Zanzibar an Arab dy- 
nasty, a lucrative slave trade and the Arabic tongue; 
then a British war-ship came, bringing with it Brit- 
ish law and order and decency, and, under the mask 
of a "protectorate," British rule. Though its golden 
age ended with the extermination of the trade in "black 
ivory," it is still a place of considerable importance: 
the end of several submarine cables, a port of call for 
many steamship lines, a naval base within easy strik- 
ing distance of the German and Portuguese colonies 
on the East Coast and guarding the lines of communica- 
tion between the Cape and the Canal, and the place of 
export for the major portion of the world's supply of 
copra, cloves, and ivory. 

Seen from the harbour, Zanzibar has little to com- 
mend it. So uninviting, indeed, is the face that it turns 
seaward, that the story is told of an American politician 
sent there as consul, who, after taking one look from the 
steamer's deck at the sun-baked town, with its treeless, 
yellow beach and its flat-roofed, whitewashed houses, 
refused to go ashore at all, from the next port at which 
the steamer called cabling his resignation to Washing- 
ton. Though a city of something over one hundred 
thousand people, with the major portion of the trade of 
East Africa in its hands, Zanzibar has neither dock, jetty, 
nor wharf, passengers and packages alike being disem- 
barked in small boats and carried through the surf 
on the shoulders of Swahili boatmen. There are no 
words in the language adequate to describe the scene 

144 



IN ZANZIBAR 

which takes place on the beach bordering the harbour 
when a mail steamer comes in. The passengers — white- 
helmeted tourists; pompous, drill-clad officials; sallow- 
faced Parsee merchants; chattering Hindoo artisans; 
haughty, hawk-nosed Arabs; and cotton-clad Swahilis 
from the mainland — are unceremoniously dumped with 
their belongings on the sand, where they instantly be- 
come the centres of shouting, pleading, cursing, strug- 
ghng, gesticulating, perspiring mobs of porters and 
hotel-runners, from whose rough importunities they 
are rescued only by the efforts of a dozen askaris, who 
lay their rhinoceros-hide whips about them indiscrim- 
inately. 

When a poor imitation of order has been restored 
and the luggage has been rescued and sorted, you start 
for the hotel — there is only one deserving of the name — 
with a voluble hotel-runner cHnging to your arm as 
though afraid you would break away, and followed 
by a miniature safari of porters balancing trunks, hat- 
boxes, kit-bags, gun-cases, bath-tubs, and the other im- 
pedimenta of an African traveller on their turbaned 
heads. Returning the ostentatious salute of the tan- 
coloured sentry at the head of the water-stairs, you fol- 
low your guide through a series of tortuous and narrow 
alleys, plunge into the darkness of an ill-smelling tunnel, 
and suddenly emerge, blinded with the sun-glare, into 
a thoroughfare lined on either side with tiny, fascinat- 
ing, hole-in-the-wall shops, whose owners rush out and 
offer you their silver, ivory, and ostrich-feather wares 
vociferously. 

145 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Quite unexpectedly the procession halts under a 
swinging sign bearing the legend " Afrika Hotel. " The 
proprietor, a rotund, red-cheeked German who looks 
as if he had stepped straight out of a Munich beer-gar- 
den, escorts you pantingly up two — three — four flights 
of stone stairs, lined on either side with strange native 
weapons and East Coast curios, to a brick-floored cell' 
under the roof, there being more likehhood of catching 
an occasional breeze, he explains, near the top. Wind 
in any form is as scarce in Zanzibar as rain is in the 
Sahara, and when they do get a breath of air strong 
enough to stir the window curtains it is as much of an 
event as a cyclone is in Kansas. The furniture of the 
room, monastic in its simplicity, consists of an iron 
bed, an iron table, an iron chair, and an iron washstand 
supporting a tin bowl and pitcher, for anything which 
is not of metal stands an excellent chance of destruc- 
tion by the devastating swarms of red ants. The bed is 
draped with a double thickness of mosquito netting of 
so fine a mesh that the air within feels strained and 
unnourishing, hke milk that has been skimmed and 
watered, and the heavy shutters are closed in a fruitless 
attempt to keep out some of the stifling mid-day heat, 
though the proprietor, after glancing at the thermom- 
eter, remarks that it isn't so hot after all, being only 120 
in the shade. 

You are advised to go to bed in the dark, as a light 
would attract the mosquitoes, and never, never, under 
any circumstances, to get into bed until you have as- 
sured yourself that there are no mosquitoes inside the 

146 




"Zanzibar has neither dock, Jetty, nor wharf, passengers and packages alike being disembarked in small 
boats and carried through the surf on the shoulders of Swahili boatmen." 




Phi>tn!.niph by DrLor.i. /..inzih.ir. 

The business portion of Zanzibar is a wilderness of narrow streets and dim bazaars, hemmed in with tiny 
shops and wretched dwellings, with here and there an ancient house dating from the Portuguese 
occupation. 

THE c;ate\vav to east AERICA. 



IN ZANZIBAR 

curtains, though the proprietor cheerfully adds: "But 
you can only get fever from the black-and-white-striped 
ones." Likewise, you are solemnly warned never to 
go out of doors during the day without a topee lest you 
die from sunstroke (I knew one man who took off his 
helmet long enough to wave good-bye to a departing 
friend and was dead in an hour in consequence) ; never 
to drink other than bottled water (at two rupees the 
bottle) lest you die from typhoid; never to stay out 
of doors after nightfall lest you contract malaria; never 
to put on your boots without first shaking them out 
lest a snake or scorpion have chosen them to spend the 
night in; never to return late at night from the club 
without getting a policeman to escort you, lest a native 
thug run a knife between your shoulder-blades; and 
never to put your revolver under your pillow, where it 
cannot be reached without attracting attention, but to 
keep it beside you in the bed, so that you can shoot 
through the bedclothes without warning if you should 
wake up to find an intruder in your room. 

The best and most interesting thing about the 
Afrika Hotel is its bath, a forbidding, stone-floored 
room, totally devoid of furniture or tub. It is sepa- 
rated from the sleeping-room by the hotel parlour, so 
that lady callers unaccustomed to Zanzibar ways are 
sometimes a trifle startled to see a gentleman whose 
only garment is a bath-towel pass through the parlour 
with a hop-skip-and-jump on his way to the bath. You 
clap your hands, which is the East Coast equivalent for 
pressing a button, and in prompt response appears an 

147 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

ebony-skinned domestic bearing on his head a Stand- 
ard Oil can filled with water. Running through a staple 
in the ceiUng is a rope, and to the end of this rope he 
attaches the can, hoisting it until it swings a dozen feet 
above your head. Hanging from a hole in the side of 
the can is a cord. When you are ready for your bath 
you stand underneath the can, jerk the cord sharply, 
and the can empties itself over you like a cloudburst. 
Then you clap your hands and wait until the Swahili 
brings more water, when you do it all over again. 

The first thing the new arrival in Zanzibar does is 
to bathe and put on a fresh suit of white Hnen, for to 
appear presentable in the terrible humidity of the East 
Coast requires at least four white suits a day; and the 
second thing he does is to call upon the consul, a very 
homesick young gentleman, who is so glad to see any one' 
from " God's country" that he is only too eager to spend 
his meagre salary in entertaining him. If it is drawing 
toward sunset you will probably find him just starting 
for the golf club, which is the rendezvous at nightfall 
for Zanzibar's European society, whose chief recrea- 
tions, so far as I could see, are golf, gambling, and gossip. 
With a sturdy, khaki-clad Swahili, a brass American 
eagle on the front of his fez, trotting between the shafts 
of the consular 'rickshaw (the Department of State 
refuses to appropriate enough money to provide our 
representative with a carriage), and another pushing 
behind, you whirl down the bright red highway which 
leads to the suburb of Bububu; past the white resi- 
dency from which the British consul-general gives 

148 



IN ZANZIBAR 

his orders to the httle brown man who is permitted 
to play at ruHng Zanzibar; past the pohce barracks, 
where, at sight of the eagle on the 'rickshaw cooHes' 
fezes, the sentry on duty shouts some unintelhgible 
jargon, a bugle blares, and a group of native constables 
spring into hne and bring their hands smartly to the 
salute as you pass; past the Marconi station on the 
cHff, where the wireless chatters ceaselessly with Baga- 
moyo and Kihndini and Dar-es-Salam; until you come 
to a sudden halt before a bungalow, almost hidden in a 
wonderful tropic garden, whose broad verandas over- 
look an emerald velvet golf course which stretches from 
the highway to the sea. 

Playing golf in Zanzibar always struck me as one 
of the most incongruous things I ever did. It seems as 
though one ought to devote his energies to pirating or 
pearl-fishing or slave-trading in a place with such a 
name. Moreover, there is such a continuous circus pro- 
cession passing along the highway — natives in kangas 
of every pattern and colour; Masai and Swahih warri- 
ors from the mainland; Parsee bankers in victorias and 
Hindoo merchants in 'rickshaws; giant privates of the 
King's African Rifles in bottle-green tunics and blue 
puttees; veiled women of the Sultan's zenana out for 
an airing in cumbersome, gaudily painted barouches, 
preceded and followed by red-jacketed lancers on white 
horses; perhaps his Highness himself, a dapper, dis- 
contented-looking young mulatto, whirling by in a big 
gray racing-car — that it is quite out of the question to 
keep your eye on the ball, and you play very bad golf 

149 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

in consequence. Another trouble is that the caddies 
are all natives, and golf is discouraging enough in itself 
without having to shout "Fore!" or ask for a mashie 
or a putter in Swahili. 

After a perfunctory round or two you go back to 
the club-house veranda, where the European society of 
Zanzibar is seated in cane chairs, with the English 
illustrated weeklies, and tall glasses with ice tinkling 
in them. The talk is the talk of exiled white folk every- 
where: the news contained in the Renter's despatches 
which are posted each evening on the club bulletin- 
board; theconditionof the ivory market; the prospects 
for big game-shooting under the new German game laws; 
the favourites for the next day's cricket match, the next 
week's polo game, or the next month's race meet; the 
latest books, the newest plays — as gathered from the 
illustrated weeklies; what is going to become of Smyth- 
Cunninghame's widow, whose husband has just died of 
fever; is it true that Major Bufhngton has been trans- 
ferred from the "K. A. R. " to a Hne regiment; and is 
Germany really looking for war? 

That night the consul gives a dinner for you at the 
Zanzibar Club, where you are served by bare-footed ser- 
vants immaculate in crimson turbans and white Hnen, 
and, eat with soUd silver from irreproachable china, in 
a room made almost comfortable by many swinging 
punkahs. After dinner you sit on the terrace in the 
dark, somewhere between the ocean and the stars, and 
over the coffee and cigars you listen to strange stories 
of "the Coast," told by men who themselves played a 

150 



IN ZANZIBAR 

part in them. One man tells you what Stanley really 
said when, after months in the jungle without seeing a 
white man's face, he finally stumbled on the camp of 
Livingstone, and how, instead of rushing up and throw- 
ing his arms around him and crying, "Saved at last, 
old fellow; saved at last!" he lifted his helmet at sight 
of the gaunt, fever-stricken man sitting in front of the 
tent, and said very politely, just as he would if accost- 
ing a stranger on Fifth Avenue or Piccadill}^, "Doctor 
Livingstone, I believe?" Another, a wiry, bright-eyed 
Frenchman, with a face tanned to the colour of mahog- 
any, tells of the days when the route from Tanganyika 
to the coast was marked by the bleaching skeletons of 
slaves, and he points out to you, across the house-tops, 
the squalid dwelling in which Tippoo Tib, the greatest 
of all the slave-traders, died. A British commissioner, 
the glow of his cigar lighting up his ruddy face, his 
scarlet cummerbund, and his white mess jacket, relates 
in strictest confidence a chapter of secret diplomatic 
history, and you learn how the German Foreign Office 
shattered the British dream of an all-red Cape-to-Cairo 
railway, and why England is so desirous of the Congo 
being placed under international control. A captain 
of the King's African Rifles holds you spellbound with 
a recital of the amazing exploits of the American ele- 
phant poacher, Rogers, who, jeering at the attempts 
of three governments to capture him, made himself, 
single-handed, the uncrowned king of Equatoria. Then 
a Danish ivory-hunter breaks in, and you hear all sorts 
of wild tales of life on safari, of ivory-trading in the 

151 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Lado Enclave, of brushes with the Uganda police south 
of Gondokoro, and of strange tribal customs practised 
in the hinterland. When the dawn begins to creep up 
out of the east, the Englishmen tell the drowsy steward 
to bring them Scotch and sodas and the Frenchmen 
order absinthes; then every one shakes hands with 
every one else and you make your way back to your 
hotel through the narrow, silent streets, returning the 
salute of the night constable sleepily. 

No visitor leaves Zanzibar without going to the 
cemetery. Like the palace, and the stone ship built 
by a former sultan, it is one of the show places of the 
city. I saw it under the guidance of a gloomy English 
resident, who said that he always walked there every 
evening "so as to get accustomed to the place before 
staying in it permanently." Leading me across the 
well-kept grass to two newly dug graves, he waved his 
hand in a "take-your-choice; they 're-both-ready " ges- 
ture. "Two deaths to-day?" I queried. "Not yet," 
said he, "but we always keep a couple of graves ready- 
dug for Europeans. In this climate, you know, we 
have to bury very quickly." For in Zanzibar, as all 
along the East Coast, the white man's hardest fight is 
with a foe he can feel only as a poison in his burning 
veins, and can see only in the dreams of his dehrium — 
the deadly black-water fever. 

Though the streets in the outskirts of Zanzibar are 
wide, well shaded, and excellently macadamised with 
some kind of bright-red soil which recalls the roads out- 
side of Colombo, in Ceylon, the business portion of the 

152 



IN ZANZIBAR 

town, where the natives chiefly Hve, is a labyrinth of 
narrow streets and dim bazaars, hemmed in with tiny 
shops and wretched dwelHngs, with here and there an 
ancient house dating from the Portuguese occupation, 
impregnable as a feudal castle, its massive doorways of 
exquisitely carved teakwood in sharp contrast to the 
surrounding squalor. Every shop is open to the street, 
and half of them, it seemed to me, are devoted to the 
sale of ivory carvings, ostrich feathers, brassware, and 
silver-work, though the Arab workmanship is in all 
cases poorly executed and crude in design. The most 
t}^ical things to be bought in Zanzibar are the quaint 
images of African animals which the natives carve from 
the coarser grades of ivory and which make charming, 
though costly, souvenirs. Nothing is cheap in Zanzi- 
bar, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Africa, and 
every purchase is a matter of prolonged and wearisome 
negotiation, the seller fixing a fantastic price and lower- 
ing it gradually, as he thinks discreet, his rock-bottom 
figure depending upon the behaviour and appearance 
of the customer. 

Zanzibar is still the chief ivory market of the world, 
the suppHes of both elephant and rhino ivory, so I was 
assured by British officials, steadily increasing rather 
than diminishing. A few years ago it was feared that 
the supply of ivory would soon run out, but the indis- 
criminate slaughter of elephants has been checked, at 
least in British territory, by strict game laws rigidly 
enforced. Whether from the laxity of its laws or the 
indifference of its officials, German East Africa is still 

153 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

the ivory-hunter's paradise, the extermination of ele- 
phants in that colony proceeding almost unchecked. 
When one remembers that African ivory brings all the 
way from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars per hun- 
dredweight in the open market, and that the tusks of a 
full-grown elephant weigh anywhere from one hundred 
to five hundred pounds, it will be seen that the ivory- 
hunter's trade is a profitable though a hazardous one. 
Other ivory-hunters, instead of going after the elephants 
themselves, spend their time in journe3dng from village 
to village and bartering with the natives for the stores 
of ivory — some of them the produce of centuries — ^which 
most of them possess. Unless the trader knows his 
business, however, the simple-minded natives will sell 
him the so-called "dead" ivory from the bottom of the 
pile rather than the "live" ivory of elephants recently 
killed, which, because of its greater elasticity and better 
colour, commands a much higher price, and, I might 
add, forms but a small part of the supply. Somewhere 
in the neighbourhood of half a million pounds of ivory 
are shipped from Zanzibar each year to make the toilet- 
articles and billiard-balls and piano-keys of the world. 

The population of Zanzibar is pretty evenly di- 
vided between Arabs and Swahilis, with a considerable 
sprinkling of East Indians, who play the same roles of 
peddlers, petty tradesmen, and money-lenders in the 
Orient that the Jews and Armenians do in the Occident. 
The dress of the Swahili is as simple as it is striking: 
two lengths of cotton cloth, called kanga, one draped 
about the waist and the other about the shoulders, with 

154 




"TWO LITTLE GIRLS FROxM SCHOOL ARE WE." 
Theic Swahili women were Ihc two reigning beauties of Zanzibar. 



IN ZANZIBAR 

an extra remnant twisted into a turban, form the cos- 
tume of men and women alike, though the SwahiH 
women, in addition to the kanga proper, wear cotton 
pantalets resembling those in fashion in ante-bellum 
days, edged at the ankles with neat little frills, like 
those the chefs at fashionable restaurants put on lamb 
chops. These kangas are crudely stamped in an end- 
less variety of startling patterns, some of the more 
elaborate designs looking, from a little distance, as 
though embroidered. The inventiveness of the British, 
Belgian, and German designers must be sorely taxed, 
for the fashions in East Africa change as rapidly as 
they do in Paris and with as little warning, the kangas 
stamped with card-pips — hearts, diamonds, clubs, and 
spades — which were all the rage among Zanzibar's dusky 
leaders of fashion for a time, suddenly giving place to 
those bearing crude pictures of sailing-ships or Arabic 
quotations from the Koran, One negro dandy whom 
I saw paraded the streets, the envied of all his fellows, 
wearing a kanga on which was printed, in endless rep- 
etition, the British coat of arms and the loyal motto 
"God Save the King!" while still another swaggered 
by in a garment sprinkled over with the legend in letters 
six inches high "Remember the Maine!" Though the 
important trade in cotton goods which we once had with 
East Africa has long since passed into British and Ger- 
man hands, there is a certain melancholy satisfaction in 
knowing that, so firmly does the reputation of our cot- 
tons endure, the natives of all this region still insist on 
the piece goods which they purchase, whether made in 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Manchester or Dresden, bearing the stamp "American," 
and will take no other. 

The costumes of the Arabs, on the other hand, re- 
call all the stories of pirates and slave-traders which one 
associates with this romantic coast, for the men, ignor- 
ing the law which prohibits the carrying of arms, swag- 
ger insolently through the streets with dagger-filled 
sashes and trailing scimiters, their white jibbahs flap- 
ping about their sandalled feet and their snowy turbans 
cocked rakishly. The dress of the Arab women of Zan- 
zibar resembles the costume of no other people, its 
characteristic features being the immense, doughnut- 
shaped turbans and the frilled, skin-tight trousers 
striped like barber-poles. 

The universal medium of communication in Zanzi- 
bar and along the East Coast is Swahili, this lingua 
franca being generally used not only between Arabs and 
natives, and between natives and Europeans, but be- 
tween Europeans themselves, the English, French, and 
Portuguese traders who do business in German East 
Africa depending entirely upon this mutually understood 
tongue for conversing with the Germans. I remember 
once, in Dar-es-Salam, listening to an Englishman who 
knew no French and a Frenchman who knew no English 
hold an animated poHtical argument, and later on bar- 
gain with the German hotel-keeper for accommodations 
in the same outlandish tongue. 

I have always found that the farther people dwell 
from civilisation, the more punctilious they are about 
observing its usages. That is why English officials 

iS6 




E 



3 ^ 



IN ZANZIBAR 

at remote and lonely stations in India invariably put 
on evening clothes before they sit down to their solitary 
dinners, and why the question of precedence is not taken 
nearly as seriously in London or Paris or New York 
as it is in Entebbe or Sierra Leone. One would quite 
naturally suppose that the Europeans dwelhng in those 
sun-scorched, fever-ridden, God-forsaken countries along 
the East Coast would adopt the careless attitude of 
Kipling's homesick soldier, who longed for a land "where 
there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise 
a thirst"; but, strangely enough, the exact opposite 
is the case. There is plenty of drinking throughout 
Africa, it is true, for the white men dwelling there will 
assure you that to exist in such a chmate a man must 
"keep his liver afloat," but, though heavy drinking is 
the rule, the man who so far loses control of himself as 
to step beyond the bounds of decency is ostracised with 
a promptness and completeness unheard of in more 
civihsed places. This respect for the social conven- 
tions was graphically illustrated by an unpleasant little 
episode which occurred during my stay in Zanzibar. 
A young Englishman, who had been rubber-prospecting 
in the wilds of the back country for nearly a year, cele- 
brated his return to civilisation, or what stands out there 
for civiUsation, by giving a stag dinner at the club. It 
was rather a hilarious affair, as such things go, and when 
it broke up at dawn every one had had quite as much to 
drink as was good for him, while the youthful host had 
had entirely too much. In fact, he insisted on winding 
up the jollification by smashing all the crockery and 

157 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

glassware in sight, and, when the native steward re- 
monstrated, he tripped him up very neatly and sat on 
him. Some hours later, being sober and very much 
ashamed of himself, he sent a check for the damage he 
had done, together with a manly letter of apology, to 
the board of governors, which promptly responded by 
demanding his resignation. Now, to drop a man from 
a club in East Africa is equivalent to marooning him on 
a desert island, for out there the club is invariably the 
rendezvous of the respectable European society, the 
only place where one can get a European book or news- 
paper to read or a well-cooked meal to eat, and the scene 
of those dinners, dances, card parties, charades, and 
other forms of amusement which help to make existence 
in that region endurable. Not content with demanding 
his resignation and thus closing to him the gateway to 
every decent form of recreation in Zanzibar, the virtu- 
ous board of governors notified every other club on the 
coast of its action, so that when business called the 
youngster to Mombasa or Dar-es-Salam or Lourengo 
Marques, he found himself barred from the privileges of 
the clubs in those places as well. But his punishment 
did not end there, for, a few days after his escapade, two 
club members to whom he nodded upon the street cut 
him dead, while another, a man whom he had known in- 
timately for years, answered his greeting by remarking, 
as he raised his eyebrows, "Really, sir, I don't think I 
have the pleasure of your acquaintance. " 

In the happy-go-lucky days before the reorganisa- 
tion of our consular service a profane and uncouth 

158 



IN ZANZIBAR 

lumberman named Mulligan — the name will do as well 
as another — was rewarded for certain political services 
by being appointed consul at Zanzibar. At that time 
the American consulate was in a building on the edge 
of the harbour and almost next door to the Sultan's 
palace. Mulligan had not been in Zanzibar a week 
before he began to complain that he was being robbed 
of his sleep by the women of the royal harem, who chose 
the comparatively cool hour just before sunrise in which 
to bathe on the sandy beach below the consulate win- 
dows. MulHgan, after making numerous complaints 
mthout receiving any satisfaction, openly announced 
that the next morning he was disturbed he would take 
the law into his own hands. He did not have to wait 
long for an opportunity, for, returning a few nights 
later from an unusually late seance at the club, he 
had scarcely fallen asleep when he was aroused by the 
shrieks of laughter of native women bathing beneath 
his window. Springing out of bed, he caught up a shot- 
gun standing in the corner, shpped in a shell loaded 
with bird-shot, and, pushing the muzzle out of the win- 
dow, fired at random. The roar of the discharge was 
echoed by a chorus of piercing screams and Arabic 
ejaculations of pain and terror, whereupon the consul, 
satisfied that he had effectually frightened the dis- 
turbers of his rest, returned to bed and to sleep. An 
hour later he was reawakened by his excited vice- 
consul, who burst into the bedroom exclaiming, "You'll 
have to get out of here quick, Mr. Consul! It won't be 
healthy for you in Zanzibar after what happened this 

159 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

morning. There's a German boat in the harbour and 
if you hurry you'll just about catch her! But there's 
no time to spare." "Now, what the devil have I got 
to get out of here for, confound you?" demanded the 
consul, now thoroughly awake and thoroughly angry. 
''Certainly not because I frightened a lot of nigger 
wenches who were waking me up at four o'clock every 
morning with their damned hullabaloo?" "Nigger 
wenches nothing!" exclaimed the vice-consul, as he 
began to throw his chief's belongings into a trunk. 
"When you let off that load of bird-shot this morn- 
ing you peppered the Sultan's favourite wife, and now 
the old man's fairly hopping with rage and swears that 
he'll have your hfe even if you are the American 
consul." Forty minutes later ex-Consul MulHgan 
ascended the gangway of a homeward-bound steamer, 
for those were the days before the British protect- 
orate, when the tyrannical sultans of Zanzibar were 
laws unto themselves. 

The morning before I left I went with the consul 
to call on .his Highness Seyyid Ali bin Hamoud bin 
Mohammed, the Sultan of Zanzibar.* The 'rickshaw 
stopped with a jerk in front of the handsome iron gates 
of the palace; the guard turned out and presented arms, 
while a negro bugler sounded a barbaric fanfare; an 
official in white linen and much gold lace met us at the 
entrance and escorted us up flight after flight of heavily 
carpeted stairs, until we emerged, breathless and per- 

* Since this was written Sultan Ali bin Hamoud has abdicated in 
favour of his cousin, Seyyid Khalifa. 

1 60 




o ^'Z 



o >c -5 



IN ZANZIBAR 

spiring, on the breeze-swept upper veranda of the four- 
story building, which, with its long piazzas and its un- 
compromising architecture, looks more than anything 
else like an American summer hotel. After a quarter of 
an hour spent in smoking highly perfumed cigarettes, 
another official announced that his Highness would re- 
ceive us, and we were ushered into a small room fur- 
nished like an ofhce, where a pleasant-looking young 
negro of twenty-six or so was sitting at an American 
roll-top desk dictating letters to an English secretary. 
Like every one else, he was dressed entirely in white 
Hnen, with a red tarboosh, gold shoulder-straps, and 
pumps of white buckskin. Motioning us to be seated, 
he offered us more of the perfumed cigarettes, inquir- 
ing, with an Eton accent, as to the state of my health, 
when I arrived, what were my impressions of Zanzibar, 
when I intended to leave, and where I was going. As 
we were bowing ourselves out, after ten minutes of 
perfunctory conversation, the Sultan's secretary sidled 
up and whispered: "His Highness expects that you 
will give him the pleasure of staying to luncheon. " 

The luncheon was very much the same as one would 
get at Sherry's or Claridge's or the Cafe de Paris, except 
that for our special benefit a few native dishes with 
strange names and still stranger flavours had been added 
to the menu. The wines were irreproachable and the 
Hodeidah coffee and Aleppo cigarettes could have been 
had nowhere west of Suez. My eye was caught by the 
magnificence of the jewel-monogrammed cigarette-case 
which the Sultan constantly passed to me, and I ven- 

i6i 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

tured to comment on it admiringly. "Do you like 
it?" said he, with a pleased smile. "It is only a trifle 
that I picked up last spring in Paris. Accept it from 
me as a little souvenir of your visit to Zanzibar — really 
— ^please do." Quite naturally I hesitated, as who 
would not at accepting offhand a thing worth a couple 
of thousand rupees. The Sultan looked disappointed. 
"It is not worthy of you," he remarked. "Some day 
I shall send you something more fitting," and he put it 
back in his pocket. All the rest of my stay in Zanzibar 
I kept thinking how near I came to getting that magnif- 
icent case, and what a story it would have made to tell 
at dinner tables over the camembert and coffee; and 
it almost spoiled my visit. As I was leaving the palace 
the military secretary inquired: "Why on earth didn't 
you take the cigarette case when the Sultan offered 
it?" "Polite hesitation," I replied. "I was going to 
accept it in just a minute." "In the East you should 
accept first and hesitate afterward, " he answered. 

After luncheon I played bilhards with the Sultan. 
He is a good player, and it was no trouble at all to let 
royalty win gracefully. The conversation turned on 
America. It seemed that the two Americans whom his 
Highness most admired were Theodore Roosevelt and 
John Philip Sousa; the one because he had visited Africa 
, and proved himself a real shikari ; the other because 
he had immortalised the Sultan's dominions in his A 
Typical Tune of Zanzibar. (It happened that a month 
or so later I dined with Mr. Sousa in Johannesburg and 
told him this incident, whereupon he offered to send the 

162 



IN ZANZIBAR 

Sultan an autographed copy of El Capitan. If he has 
forgotten to do it, this will serve to remind him that the 
Sultan's address is still "The Palace, Zanzibar.") In- 
cidentally his Highness mentioned that he was about 
to be married. Later on the English secretary supple- 
mented this by explaining that his latest bride — he al- 
ready had three wives — was the fifteen-year-old daugh- 
ter of a well-to-do merchant in the bazaars, with whom 
the Sultan had been haggling regarding the price to be 
paid for the girl for a year or more. After a time we 
strolled out on the breeze-swept veranda. As I leaned 
over the raihng I noticed something sticking up out 
of the harbour and I pointed to it. "What is that, 
your Highness?" I inquired. "A wreck," he answered 
shortly. "A wreck! A wreck of what?" I persisted. 
"The wreck of the Zanzibar navy," he said, turning 
away — and I suddenly recalled the story of the Httle 
gun-boat with its negro crew that stood up to the great 
British cruiser and banged away with its toy guns until 
it was sent to the bottom with every man on board, 
and all at once I felt very sorry for this youth, whose 
fathers held sway over a dominion as large as all that 
part of the United States lying west of the Rocky 
Mountains, but which, thanks to the insatiable land 
hunger of the European nations, has dwindled to a 
territory scarcely larger than Rhode Island. 

That in the not far-distant future Zanzibar will 
again play a part in the drama of international politics 
there is but little doubt. The island's position adjacent 
to the mainland, from which it is separated by a channel 

163 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

less than thirty miles wide, combined with the advan- 
tages of its deep and roomy harbour, mark it naturally 
as the chief entrepot of all East Africa, and the gate 
through which the interior of the continent is destined 
to be opened up to European settlement and exploita- 
tion. Being almost equidistant — some two thousand 
four hundred miles — from India, the Cape, and the 
Canal, and controlHng the lines of cable communica- 
tion with Madagascar and Mauritius, it affords a 
strategic position of immense importance as a naval 
base in the contingency of closing the Suez Canal in 
time of war. Germany has long had a greedy eye on 
Zanzibar, for the nation that holds it controls, both 
strategically and commercially, Germany's East Afri- 
can possessions and their capital of Dar-es-Salam. 
That England would be willing to turn Zanzibar over 
to Germany in return for the cession of a strip of terri- 
tory through German East Africa which would permit 
the completion of her long-dreamed-of, and at pres- 
ent indefinitely interrupted. Cape- to- Cairo trunk Hne, 
there is every reason to believe. So I trust that the 
little brown man in the white-and-gold uniform will en- 
joy playing at sovereignty while he may, for if that day 
ever comes to pass when the red banner on his palace 
flagstaff is replaced with the standard of Germany, there 
will pass into the pleasant oblivion of the Paris bou- 
levards the last of a long line of one-time powerful, 
oftentimes piratical, but always picturesque rulers, the 
Sultans of Zanzibar. 



164 



CHAPTER VII 

■ THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

THE other day two suave, frock-coated gentlemen, 
seated at a green-covered table in the Foreign 
OfiSce in Berhn, by putting their names to the bottom 
of a piece of parchment, caused a territory almost as 
large as the State of Texas to become French, and an- 
other territory, larger than the State of Oregon, to be- 
come German. About as many people were affected, 
though not consulted, by that international dicker — 
which has passed into history as the Morocco-Equa- 
toria Convention — as there are in the county of Lon- 
don. The lot of about four-fifths of these people will 
doubtless be materially improved, and in a few years, 
if they have any gratitude in their Moorish souls, they 
will be thanking Allah for having given them French 
instead of Sherifian justice. As for those Congolese 
blacks who compose the other fifth, they will soon find, 
unless I am very much mistaken, that the red-white- 
and-black flag stands for something very different from 
the red-white-and-blue one, and that the stiff-backed, 
guttural-tongued German officers in their tight-fitting 
uniforms will prove sterner masters than the easy- 
going French administrateurs in their topees and white 
linen. 

Now the significance of that convention does not 
lie in its ethics — which are very questionable; nor in 

i6s 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

the territory and population and resources concerned — 
which are very great; but in the fact that it brings 
within reasonable measure of fulfilment the imperial 
dream which WilHam II began dreaming some seven 
and twenty years ago, and which he recently translated 
to the world in the declaration " Germany's future Hes 
oversea." In those four words is found the foreign 
policy of the Fatherland. The episode which began 
with the sending of a war-ship to an obscure port of 
Morocco and ended with Germany's acquirement of a 
material addition to her African domain was not, as 
the world supposes, an example of the haphazard land- 
grabbing so popular with European nations, but a single 
phase of a vast and carefully laid scheme whose aim is 
the creation of a new and greater Germany oversea — 
a Deutschland Uber Meer. 

To solve the problems with which she has been con- 
fronted by her amazing increase in population and pro- 
duction, Germany has deliberately embarked on a sys- 
tematic campaign of world expansion and exploitation. 
Finding that she needs a colonial empire in her business, 
she is setting out to build one just as she would build a 
fleet of dreadnoughts or a ship canal. The fact that she 
has nothing or next to nothing to start with, does not 
worry her at all. What she cannot obtain by purchase 
or treaty she will obtain by threats, and what she can- 
not obtain by threats she stands perfectly ready to ob- 
tain by going to war. Having once made up her mind 
that the realisation of her political, commercial, and 
economic ambitions requires her to have a colonial 

i66 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

dominion, she is not going to permit anything to stand 
in the way of her getting it. In other words, wherever 
an excuse can be provided for raising a flagstaff, whether 
on an ice-floe in the Arctic or an atoll in the South 
Pacific, there the German flag shall flutter; wherever 
trade is to be found, there Hamburg cargo boats shall 
drop their anchors, there Stettin engines shall thunder 
over Essen rails, there Solingen cutlery and Silesian 
cottons shall be sold by merchants speaking the lan- 
guage of the Fatherland. It is a scheme astounding 
by its very vastness, as methodically planned as a 
breakfast-food manufacturer's advertising campaign 
and as systematically conducted; and already, thanks 
to Teutonic audacity, aggressiveness, and perseverance, 
backed up by German banks, fleets, and armies, much 
nearer realisation than most people suppose. 

In Morocco, East Africa, and the Congo; in Tur- 
key, Persia, and Malaysia; in Hayti, Brazil, and the 
Argentine; on the shores of all the continents and the 
islands of aU the seas, German merchants and German 
money are working twenty-four hours a day building 
up that oversea empire of which the Kaiser dreams. 
The activities of these pioneers of commerce and finance 
are as varied as commerce and finance themselves. 
Their guttural voices are heard in every market place; 
their footsteps resound in every avenue of human en- 
deavour. Their holdings in Brazil are the size of Euro- 
pean kingdoms, and so absolute has their power be- 
come in at least two states — Santa Catharina and Rio 
Grande do Sul — that the Brazilian Government has 

167 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

become seriously alarmed. Their mines in Persia and 
China and the Rand rival the cave of Aladdin. They 
are completing a trunk line across western Asia which 
threatens to endanger England's commercial supremacy 
in India; in Africa they are pushing forward another 
railway from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Great 
Lakes which will rival the Cape-to- Cairo system in 
tapping the trade of the Dark Continent. They own the 
light, power, and transportation monopolies of half the 
capitals of Latin America. In China the coal mines and 
railways of the great province of Shantung are in their 
hands. They work tea plantations in Ceylon, tobacco 
plantations in Cuba and Sumatra, coffee plantations in 
Guatemala, rubber plantations in the Congo, hemp 
plantations in East Africa, and cotton plantations in 
the Delta of the Nile. Their argosies, flying the house 
flags of the Hamburg American, the North German 
Lloyd, the German East Africa, the Deutsche Levante, 
and a score of other lines, carry German goods to Ger- 
man warehouses in the world's remotest corners, while 
German war-ships are constantly aprowl all up and 
down the Seven Seas, ready to protect the interests 
thus created by the menace of their guns. 

Back of the German miners and traders and rail- 
way builders are the great German banks, which, when 
all is said and done, are the real exploiters of Germany's 
interests oversea. So completely are the foreign in- 
terests of the nation in their hands that there is no rea- 
son to doubt the story that the Emperor, when warned 
by the great bankers whom he had summoned to a 

i68 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

conference over the ominous Moroccan situation that 
war with France would endanger, if not destroy, Ger- 
many's oversea ambitions, turned to his ministers with 
the remark, "Then, gentlemen, we must find a peace- 
able solution. " We of the West have not yet awakened 
to a realisation of the magnitude of Germany's foreign 
interests or to the almost sovereign powers which the 
banks behind them exercise in certain quarters of the 
world — particularly in that Latin America which we 
have complacently regarded as securely within our own 
commercial sphere. In Asia Minor the Deutsche Bank 
not only controls the great Anatolian Railway system 
but it is building the Bagdad Railway — probably the 
most important of Germany's foreign undertakings — 
these two German-owned systems providing a route by 
which German goods can be carried over German rails 
to India more cheaply than England can transport her 
own goods to her possessions in her own bottoms. In 
one hand the Disconto Bank Gesellschaft holds the 
railway and mining concessions of the Chinese prov- 
ince of Shantung, while with the other it reaches out 
across the world to grasp the railway system of Ven- 
ezuela, it being to enforce certain claims of this bank 
that the German gun-boat Panther — the same that oc- 
cupied Agadir — bombarded La Guayra in 1902 and as 
a consequence brought the relations of the United 
States and Germany uncomfortably close to the break- 
ing-point. Seven German banks — the German-Asi- 
atic Bank, the German-Brazihan Bank, the German- 
Orient Bank, the German-Palestine Bank, the Bank of 

169 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Chile and Germany, the Bank of Central America, and 
the German Overseas Bank — devote themselves ex- 
clusively to the exploitation of foreign concessions, 
either owning or dominating enterprises of every con- 
ceivable character in the regions denoted by their 
titles or lending financial assistance to German subjects 
engaged in such undertakings. 

A few years ago, when Germany was starting in the 
race for naval supremacy, the Imperial Admiralty 
issued a review of Germany's oversea interests for the 
purpose of impressing the Reichstag with the necessity 
for dreadnoughts and then more dreadnoughts. Here 
are some of the figures, taken from the list at random, 
and the more impressive because they are from official 
sources and because, since they were published, they 
have materially increased: 

North Africa $25,000,000 

Egypt 22,500,000 

Liberia 1,250,000 

Zanzibar 1,500,000 

Mozambique 2,750,000 

Madagascar 1,500,000 

British South Africa 337,500,000 

Turkey and the Balkans 112,500,000 

British India and Ceylon 27,500,000 

Straits Settlements 8,750,000 

China , 87,500,000 

Mexico 87,500,000 

Venezuela and Colombia 312,500,000 

Peru and Chile 127,500,000 

Argentine 187,500,000 

Brazil , 400,000,000 

And this endless caravan of figures represents but a frac- 
tion of Germany's transmarine interests, remember, for 

170 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

it does not include her colonies on both coasts of Africa, 
in North China, and in the South Seas. Now, if you will 
again glance over the above list of Germany's foreign 
interests, you can hardly fail to be struck by the fact 
that by far the greater part of them are in countries 
notorious for the weakness and instability of their gov- 
ernments, as, for example, China, Morocco, Turkey, 
Liberia, Mexico, and Venezuela; or in countries which, 
though possessing stable governments, would not be 
strong enough successfully to resist German aggression 
or German demands. In regions where German settlers 
abound and where German banks are in financial con- 
trol it is seldom difficult for Germany to find an excuse 
for meddling. It may be that a German settler is at- 
tacked, or a German consul insulted, or a German bank 
has difficulty in collecting its debts. So the slim cables 
carry a dash-dotted message to the Foreign Office in 
Berlin; instantly the cry goes up that in Morocco or 
China or Venezuela or Hayti German "interests" are 
imperilled; and before the government of the country 
in question realises that anything out of the ordinary 
has happened a cruiser with a German flag drooping 
from her taffrail is lying off one of its coast towns. 
Before the silent menace of that war-ship is removed, 
Germany generally manages to obtain a concession 
to build a railway, or a ninety-nine-year lease of a 
coaling-station, or the cession of a strip of more or less 
valuable territory, and so goes merrily and steadily on 
the work of building up a German empire oversea. 

But these interests, world-wide though they are, 
171 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

fail to satisfy the German expansionist party whose 
prophet is the Kaiser. They demand something more 
material than figures; they would see the German flag 
floating over government houses instead of warehouses, 
over fortifications instead of plantations. They would 
see more of the map of the world painted in German 
colours. But Germany was late in getting into the col- 
onising game, so that wherever she has gone she has 
found other nations already in possession. In North 
Africa her prospectors and concession-hunters found 
the French too firmly established to be ousted; the 
only territory left in South Africa over which she could 
raise her flag was so arid and worthless that neither 
England nor Portugal had troubled to include it in their 
dominions; though she bullied China into leasing her 
the port of Kiauchau, the further territorial expansion 
in the Celestial Empire of which she had dreamed was 
halted by Russian jealousy and Japanese ambition; 
around Latin America — the most enticing field of all — 
stretched the protecting arm of the Monroe Doctrine 

Now, these "Keep Off the Grass" signs with which 
she was everywhere confronted did not improve Ger- 
many's disposition. They made her feel abused and 
peevish, and whenever she saw a foreign flag flying over 
some God-forsaken islet in the Pacific or a stretch of 
snake-infested African jungle, she resented it deeply 
and said that she was being denied "a place in the sun. " 
So when France despatched an expedition to Fez in the 
summer of 191 1 to teach the Moorish tribesmen proper 
respect for French property and French lives, Germany 

172 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

seized on that action as an excuse for occupying a 
IMoroccan harbour and a strip of the adjacent coast, on 
the pretext that her interests there were being jeopard- 
ised, and flatly refused to evacuate it unless France gave 
her something in return. I might mention, in passing, 
that Germany's interests in Morocco are considerably 
more important than is generally supposed, the powerful 
Westphahan firm of Mannesmann Brothers having 
obtained from Sultan Abdul Aziz extensive mining, 
ranching, and plantation concessions in that portion of 
his empire which the German newspapers proceeded 
to prematurely dub "West Marokko Deutsch.'^ The 
rich iron deposits in this region, when taken in conjunc- 
tion with the alarming decrease of the ore supply in the 
German mines and the consequent shortage which 
threatens the German iron and steel industry, un- 
doubtedly provided one of the reasons underlying the 
Kaiser's interference with the French programme in 
IMorocco. 

France, knowing full well the enormous political 
and commercial value of Morocco, and determined to 
complete her African empire by its acquirement, after 
months of haggling, during which battle-ships and army 
corps were moved about like chessmen, consented to 
compensate Germany by ceding her a slice of the colony 
of French Equatorial Africa, better known, perhaps, as 
the French Congo.* It was a good bargain that France 
made, too, for she took an empire and gave a jungle in 

♦Germany has given her new colony the official designation "New 
Kamerun." 

173 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

exchange. But Germany made the better bargain, it 
seems to me, for by agreeing to a French protector- 
ate over Morocco she obtained one hundred thousand 
square miles of African soil without its costing her a foot 
of land or a dollar in exchange. From the view-point 
of the world at large, Germany emerged from the Mo- 
roccan imbroglio with a good-sized strip of equatorial 
territory, presumably rich in undeveloped resources, 
certainly rich in savages, snakes, and fevers, and, every- 
thing considered, of very doubtful value. But to Ger- 
many this stretch of jungle land meant far more than 
that. It was a territory which she had wanted, watched, 
and waited for ever since she entered the game of co- 
lonial expansion. It is one of the links — in many re- 
spects the most essential one — ^which she requires to 
connect her scattered possessions in the Dark Conti- 
nent and to bar the advance of her great rival, England, 
to the northward by stretching an unbroken chain of 
German colonies across Africa from coast to coast. The 
acquisition of that piece of west-coast jungle marked 
the greatest stride which Germany has yet taken in her 
march toward an empire oversea. 

Heretofore Germany has been in much the same 
predicament as a boy who tries to put a picture puzzle 
together when some of the pieces are missing. In Ger- 
many's case the missing pieces were held by England, 
France, Belgium, and Portugal, and they refused to give 
them up. If you will open the family atlas to the map 
of Africa, you wiU see that Germany's four colonies on 
that continent are so widely separated that their con- 

174 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

solidation is apparently out of the question. Northern- 
most of all, and set squarely in the middle of that pes- 
tilential coast-line variously named and noted for its 
slaves, its ivory, and its gold, and aptly called "the 
rottenest coast in the world," is the colony of Togo. 
Approximately the size of Cuba and rich in native prod- 
ucts, it is so remote from the other German possessions 
that its only value is in providing Germany with a quid 
pro quo which she can use in negotiating for some terri- 
tory more desirable. In the right angle formed by the 
Gulf of Guinea is the colony of Kamerun, a rich, fertile, 
and exceedingly unhealthful possession about the size 
of Spain. Though its hinterland reaches inland to 
Lake Tchad, it has hitherto been destitute of good har- 
bours or navigable rivers, being barred from the Niger 
by British Nigeria and from the Congo, until the recent 
territorial readjustment, by French Equatorial Africa. 
Follow the same coast-line twelve hundred miles to 
the southward and you will come to German South- 
west Africa, a barren, inhospitable, sparsely populated 
land, stretching from a harbourless coast as far inland 
as the Desert of Kalahari. On the other side of the 
continent, just south of the Equator, Ues German East 
Africa, almost twice the size of the mother country 
and the largest and richest of the Kaiser's transmarine 
possessions. The combined area of these four colonies 
is equal to that of all the States east of the Mississippi 
put together; certainly a substantial foundation on 
which to begin the erection of an empire, especially 
when it is remembered that French Africa, which now 

175 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

comprises forty-five per cent of the continent, is for the 
most part the work of but a single generation. 

When Monsieur Cambon and Herr von Kiderlein- 
Waechter put their pens to the piece of parchment of 
which I have already spoken, the boundary of the Kam- 
erun was automatically extended southward almost 
to the Equator and eastward some hundreds of miles to 
the Logone River, the apex of the angle formed by the 
meeting of these new frontiers touching the Congo River 
and thereby bringing the Kamerun into contact with the 
Belgian Congo. In other words, Germany's great col- 
onies on either coast are no longer separated by French 
and Belgian territory, but by Belgian alone — and Bel- 
gium, remember, is both weak and neutral. Now, it is by 
no means beyond the bounds of possibility that Belgium ' 
might consent to sell Germany either the whole or a 
portion of the Congo, for the financial difficulties of 
that colony have been very great, and it has never been 
able to pay its way, its wants having been supplied 
at first by large gifts of money from King Leopold, and 
more recently by loans raised and guaranteed by Bel- 
gium. This unsatisfactory financial condition not hav- 
ing helped to popularise the Congo with the thrifty 
Belgians, there is considerable reason to beheve that 
the Brussels Government would lend an attentive ear 
to any proposals which Germany might make toward 
its purchase. England might be expected, of course, to 
oppose the sale of the Congo to Germany tooth and nail, 
it being the fear of just such an eventuality which caused 
her to seize on the rubber atrocities as an excuse for her 

176 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

vigorous and persistent advocacy of the international- 
isation of the Congo. Though France holds the rever- 
sionary rights to the Congo, there are no grounds for 
beheving that she would place any serious obstacles in 
the way of its acquisition by Germany, for she has given 
it to be understood that she intends devoting her ener- 
gies henceforward to the exploitation of her enormous 
possessions in North Africa. Assuming, then — and these 
assumptions, believe me, are not nearly so chimer- 
ical as they may sound — that the Belgian Government 
should sell Germany all or a part of the Congo, Ger- 
many's possessions would then stretch across the con- 
tinent from coast to coast, comprising all that is most 
worth having in Equatorial Africa. 

While we are about it, let us carry our assumptions 
one step farther and take it for granted that Portugal 
could be induced to dispose of her great west-coast 
colony of Angola, to which Germany already possesses 
the reversionary rights. It is not only possible, but 
probable, that a good round offer of money, or perhaps 
another Agadir performance, based on some easily 
found pretext and backed up by German war-ships in 
the Tagus, would induce the Lisbon Government to 
hand over Angola, along with its fevers and its slavery, 
to the Germans. Portugal is bitterly poor, its govern- 
ment is weak and vacillating, and a long Hst of failures 
has left the people with little stomach for colonisation. 
The Portuguese RepubUc has few friends among the 
monarchical nations of Europe and could count on 
scant aid from them in resisting Teutonic coercion. It 

177 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

is asserted in diplomatic circles, indeed, that the ink on 
the Morocco-Equatoria Convention was scarcely dry 
before the German minister in Lisbon had opened secret 
pourparlers with the Portuguese Foreign Office with a 
view to the purchase of both Angola and the east-coast 
colony of Mozambique.* The acquisition of Angola 
would supply Germany with the final link needed to 
unite her colonies in East, West, and Southwest Africa, 
thus giving her an African empire second in size only to 
that of France. Far-fetched and far-distant as all this 
may sound, I have but roughly sketched for you that 
imperial dream for whose fulfilment the Kaiser and 
his people are indefatigably working and confidently 
waiting. 

Very few people are aware that, as long ago as 
1898, England and Germany concluded a secret agree- 
ment which definitely provides for the eventual dis- 
position of Portugal's African possessions. Of its true 
history and scope, however, little has ever leaked out. 
It grew out of Joseph Chamberlain's restless and am- 
bitious schemes for the consolidation of British domin- 
ion in Africa. Appreciating, early in the Boer War, 
that England's success in that struggle would largely 
depend upon Germany remaining strictly neutral, that 
master statesman proposed to the Berlin Government 
a plan the effect of which was to divide the reversion of 
Angola and Mozambique between Great Britain and 

* Though commonly applied to the colony of Portuguese East Africa, 
the iiame Mozambique belongs, strictly speaking, only to the northernmost 
province of that possession. 

178 



/ 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

Germany, inferentially leaving the former a free hand 
south of the Zambezi. This was the famous Secret ' 
Treaty, the final text of which was afterward signed 
by Lord SaHsbury, and it was largely in virtue of this 
agreement that England was free from German inter- 
ference during the Boer War. It is an interesting com- 
ment on the ethics of international politics that this 
remarkable agreement was concluded without any con- 
sultation of Portugal, the country the most vitally 
concerned. Delagoa Bay is no longer as imperative a 
necessity to England as it was in 1898, at which time 
it was the quickest way to reach the Transvaal, and, 
on the other hand, the West Coast is daily becoming 
more important for strategical and commercial reasons, 
for the "Afro" railway, of which I have made mention 
in the chapter on Morocco, will become in the near 
future the great highway between Europe and South 
America, while the railway now being built between 
Benguela (Lobito Bay) and the Katanga region will 
provide the easiest and quickest means of communicat- 
ing with Rhodesia and the Transvaal. The terms of 
the Anglo-German Secret Treaty are of interest, how- 
ever, as indicating how that portion of the African con- 
tinent lying south of the Congo will be eventually 
parcelled out, and as showing the framework on which 
is being slowly but surely, constructed Germany's 
African empire. 

The erection of such a German state across the mid- ^ 

die of Africa would have far-reaching results in more 
directions than one. In the first place, it would end 

179 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

« 

forever England's long-cherished ambition of eventually 
linking up her Sudanese and South African possessions 
and thus completing an "All Red" route from Cairo to 
the Cape. In the second place, Germany is now in a 
position to build her own transcontinental railway — 
from east to west instead of from north to south — on 
German or neutral soil all the way, thus removing the 
completion of the Cape-to-Cairo system, even under 
international auspices, to a very distant day, and mak- 
ing Dar-es-Salam and Duala, instead of Cape Town and 
Alexandria, the starting-points for those highways of 
steel which are destined to open up inner Africa. 

It is surprising how Uttle even the well-informed 
know of these far places which Germany has taken for 
her own. Fertile spots as any upon earth, covered 
with hard-wood forests and watered by many rivers, 
when seen from the shade of an awning over a ship's 
deck they are as alluring as the stage of a theatre set for 
a sylvan opera. Go a thousand yards back from that 
smiling coast, however, and the illusion disappears, for 
you find a country whose hostile natives, savage beasts, 
and deadly fevers combine to make it deserving of its 
title — "the white man's graveyard." The statesmen 
of the Wilhelmstrasse must have taken a long look 
into the future when they raised the German flag over 
such lands as these. The returns they have yielded 
thus far would have discouraged a man less sanguine 
than William HohenzoUern. Though subsidised Ger- 
man steam-ships ply along their coasts, though their 
forests resound to the clank and clang of German rail- 

i8o 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

way-builders' tools, though the plantations of govern- 
ment-assisted settlers dot the back country, though she 
has spent on them thousands of lives and millions of 
marks, Germany's only returns thus far have been a few 
annual tons of ivory, copra, and rubber, some excellent 
but unprofitable harbours, and many lonely stations 
where her sons contract fevers and pessimism. But I 
would stake my life that this out-of-the-way, back- 
of-beyond, sun-blistered, fever-stricken German Africa 
will be a great colony some day. 

From the care with which they are laid out, from 
the perfection of their sanitary arrangements, from the 
substantiahty of their pubHc buildings and official resi- 
dences and their suitability to the climatic conditions, 
the travellers who confine their investigations to the 
coast are readily deceived into thinking that Tanga 
and Bagamoyo and Dar-es-Salam and Swakopmund 
and Duala are the gateways to rich and prosperous 
colonies. From the very outset, however, the imperial 
government based its claim for popular support in its 
colonial ventures upon the erroneous assumption that 
German colonies would attract Germans, and that in 
this way the language of the Fatherland would be spread 
abroad and eventually supplant that of Shakespeare. 
The Germans, however, have stubbornly refused to go 
to their own colonies, preferring those where Enghsh 
is the speech and where there are fewer officials and 
more freedom. To-day, therefore, you find the model 
German towns, so perfectly built that you feel as though 
you were walking through a municipal exhibition, al- 

i8i 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

most wholly peopled by brass-bound, hide-bound 
officials, while the German traders are carrying on 
thriving businesses under the English flag at Mom- 
basa and Zanzibar and Sierra Leone, 

Now, Germany has no one but herself to blame for 
this condition of affairs, having brought it about by the 
short-sightedness of her colonial policy and the harshness 
and incapacity of her officials. Intending to found in- 
dustrial colonies, she created military settlements in- 
stead, administering and exploiting them, not as if they 
were German lands, but as if they were an enemy's 
country. Nothing emphasises more sharply the purely 
military character of Germany's African colonies than 
the fact that there are seven soldiers or officials to every 
German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of the 
most trying cHmates in the world, the officials seem to 
take a malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil 
population, thus driving the traders — who form the 
backbone of every colony — to take up their residence in 
English ports and so paralysing German trade. The 
soldiers, for want of something better to do, are forever 
seeking advancement by making unnecessary expedi- 
tions into the hinterland for the purpose of "punishing" 
the natives, thus causing them to migrate by whole- 
sale into British, Belgian, and even Portuguese terri- 
tory, so that the German colonies are left without labour 
and the plantations are consequently being ruined. 

The needless severity of Germany's colonial rule 
is graphically illustrated by the fact that during 191 1 
there were 14,849 criminal convictions in German East 

182 




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THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

Africa alone, or one conviction to every 637 natives; 
vvliile in the adjoining protectorate of Uganda, among 
the same type of natives but under a British administra- 
tion, the ratio of convictions was only one in 2,047. 
There is not a town in German East Africa where you 
cannot see boys of from eight to fourteen years, shackled 
together by chains running from iron collar to iron col- 
lar and guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, doing the 
work of men under a deadly sun. Natives with bleed- 
ing backs are constantly making their way into British 
and Belgian territory with tales of maltreatment by 
German planters, while stories of German tyranny, bru- 
tality, and corruption — of some instances of which I was 
myself a witness — form staple topics of conversation 
on every club veranda and steamer's deck along these 
coasts. In German Southwest Africa the dearth of 
labour, owing to the practical extermination of the 
Herero nation in Germany's last "little war" in that 
colony, has become a serious and pressing problem. In 
a single campaign — which cost Germany five hundred 
million marks and the lives of two thousand soldiers, 
and which could have been avoided altogether by a 
little tact and kindness — half the total population of 
the colony was kiUed in battle or driven into the desert 
to perish. That is why the builders of the Swakop- 
mund-Otavi Railway in German Southwest Africa — the 
longest two-foot-gauge line in the world — have to send 
to Europe for their labour. Until Germany makes a 
radical change in her methods of colonial administra- 
tion, and until she learns that traders and labourers are 

183 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

more essential to a colony's prosperity than pompous 
and domineering officials, her colonial accounts will con- 
tinue to stand heaviest on the debit side of the ledger. 
Successful colonial administration in Africa, as in 
all tropical countries, is largely a matter of tempera- 
ment, and the stolid sons of the Fatherland seem, 
strangely enough, to be more quickly affected by the 
demoralising climate and to be irritated more easily 
than either the English or the French. The English- 
man's sense of justice and the Frenchman's sense of 
humour are their chief assets as successful colonisers 
and rulers of alien peoples, but the German colonial 
official, who is generally serious by nature and almost 
always domineering as the result of his training, pos- 
sesses neither of these invaluable attributes and is heav- 
ily handicapped in consequence. It is no easy task with 
which he is confronted, remember. The loneliness and 
the privations of the white man's life, and the debility 
that comes from the heat and the rains and the fevers, 
when combined with the strain of governing and educat- 
ing an inconceivably lazy, stubborn, stupid, and in- 
tractable people, make the job of an African official one 
of the most trying in the world. The loneliness and the 
climate seem to grip a German as they never do an 
Englishman, and he becomes irritable and ugly and 
unreasonably annoyed by trifles, so that when a native 
fails to get out of his way quickly enough, or to salute 
him with the punctiliousness which he considers his 
due, he flies into a rage and orders the man to be flogged. 
The native goes back to his village with a bleeding back 

184 




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ON THE TERRIBLE EAST COAST. 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

and hatred in his heart, and, as Hkely as not, a bloody, 
costly, and troublesome native uprising ensues. The 
African native is, after all, nothing but an overgrown 
and very aggravating child, and his upbringing is a job 
for school-teachers instead of drill sergeants, and the 
sooner the imperial government appreciates that fact 
the better. 

I went to German East Africa, which is the Kaiser's 
star colony, expecting to be deeply impressed; I came 
away deeply disappointed. It is only about fifty miles 
from Zanzibar across to Dar-es-Salam, the capital of 
the colony, but the local steamer, which is the size of a 
Hudson River tugboat and rolls horribly on the slightest 
provocation, manages to use up the better part of a 
day in making the trip. Seen from the steamer's deck, 
Dar-es-Salam presents one of the most enchanting pic- 
tures that I know, and every one who goes ashore there 
does so with high expectations. Imagine, if you can, 
a city of two hundred thousand people, with the im- 
posing, red-roofed schools and churches and hospitals 
and barracks and municipal buildings of, say, Diissel- 
dorf , and the white-waUed, broad-verandaed, bungalow 
dwellings of southern California; with concrete wharves 
and cement sidewalks and beautifully macadamised 
roads and many pubhc parks: imagine all this, I say, 
dropped down in the midst of a palm grove on one of the 
hottest and unhealthiest coasts in the world — that is 
Dar-es-Salam. The hotel is, barring the one at Kandy 
in Ceylon and another at Ancon in the Canal Zone, the 
best and most beautiful tropical hostelry I have ever 

185 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

seen, but, as it is owned and run by the government, 
for the benefit of its officials, its manager, a blond, florid- 
faced, pompadoured Prussian, was as independent as a 
hotel clerk in a city where a presidential convention is 
going on. Just as in the other German colonies, I found 
East Africa to be suffering from a severe attack of mili- 
tarism. I saw more sentries and patrols and guards 
during my four days' stay in Dar-es-Salam than I did in 
Constantinople during the Turkish Revolution. I was 
lulled to sleep by regimental bugles and I was awakened 
by them again at daybreak, and I never set foot out of 
doors without meeting a column of native soldiery, 
their black faces peering out stoHdly from beneath the 
sun-aprons, their spindle shanks encased in spiral 
puttees, their feet rising and falHng in the senseless 
"parade step" in time to the monotonous "rechts! 
links! rechts! links !'^ of the German sergeant. But 
what struck me most forcibly about Dar-es-Salam was 
that it appeared to have no business. Apparently the 
soldiers had frightened it away. The harbours of Mom- 
basa and Zanzibar and Beira and Lourengo Marques 
are alive with steamers taking on or discharging cargo 
(and quite two out of three of them fly the German flag), 
and their streets are lined with ofiices and warehouses 
and "factories" (over the doors of many of which are 
signs bearing German names), and their wharves are 
piled high with bales of merchandise going to or com- 
ing from the four comers of the earth; but in the harbour 
of Dar-es-Salam, as in all the other German harbours 
I visited, the only vessels are white German gun-boats 

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Native infantry. German East Africa. A few years ago these men were just such savages as those 

shown above. 

THE HAND OF THE WAR LORD IN GERMAN AFRICA. 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AERICA 

or rusty German tramps; its streets are lined with 
government offices instead of business offices; on its 
wharves are a few puncheons of palm-oil, or other 
products of the bush, and nothing more. 

However much the administration of the German 
colonies may be open to criticism, and however slow 
they may have been in commercial development, I have 
nothing but praise and admiration for the accomplish- 
ments of their railway-builders. Erom Dar-es-Salam 
I travelled inland by railway motor-car nearly to Kila- 
matinde, a distance of three hundred and seventy miles, 
through one of the most savage regions in Africa, over 
one of the best graded and ballasted roadbeds I have 
ever seen. The Hne is now being pushed forward from 
Kilamatinde toward Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, which 
it will reach, so the chief engineer assured me, by the 
summer of 19 14. Erom Ujiji, which, by the way, is the 
place where Stanley discovered Livingstone, a steamer 
service will be inaugurated to Albertville, on the Bel- 
gian shore of the lake, whence a line is under construc- 
tion to the navigable waters of the Lualaba, which is 
one of the chief tributaries of the Congo; while an- 
other Hne of steamers will ply between Ujiji and Kituta, 
in northeastern Rhodesia, which point the British 
Cape-to-Cairo system is approaching. By the close 
of 1 914, in all probability therefore, the traveller who 
lands at Dar-es-Salam will be able to travel by train, 
with the passage across Lake Tangan3dka as the only 
interruption, to the Cape of Good Hope, or by train 
and river steamer to the mouth of the Congo ^ and in 

187 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

perfect comfort and safety all the way. As Walfish 
Bay, the only harbour in Southwest Africa worthy of 
the name, belongs to England, the Germans, finding 
themselves unable to buy it and appreciating that a 
harbourless colony is all but worthless, promptly set 
to work and built themselves artificial harbours at 
Swakopmund and at Liideritz Bay, though at appalling 
cost. That Germany is exceedingly anxious to acquire 
Walfish Bay, and that she stands ready to make almost 
any reasonable concession to obtain it, there is httle 
doubt. The mere fact that Walfish Bay is owned by 
England is a source of constant aggravation to the Ger- 
mans, for it lies squarely in the middle of their South- 
west African coast-line, its roomy roadstead and deep 
anchorage being in sharp contrast to the German port 
of Liideritz Bay, which is being rapidly sanded up, and 
that of Swakopmund, a harbour on which the Berlin 
Government has already thrown away several millions 
of marks. Liideritz Bay is already connected with the 
inland town of Keetmanshoop by three hundred and 
fifty miles of narrow-gauge line, and plans are now under 
consideration for pushing this southeastward so as to 
Hnk up with the South African system near KLimberley, 
while from Swakopmund another iron highway, four 
hundred miles long, gives access to the Otavi copper- 
mining country and will doubtless be extended, in the 
not far-distant future, to the Rhodesian border, tapping 
the main fine of the Cape-to-Cairo system in the neigh- 
bourhood of the Victoria Falls. 

I have laid considerable stress upon the subject of 



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A way-station on the line of the German East African Railway. 
RAILROADING THROUGH A JUNGLE. 



THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA 

railways, because it seems to me that in them lies the 
chief hope of the German colonies, for wherever the 
railway goes there goes civilisation. Throughout the 
vast and potentially rich regions thus being opened up 
by the locomotive the imperial government is pour- 
ing out money unstintingly in the construction of roads, 
bridges, and reservoirs, the sinking of artesian wells, the 
establishment of telegraph lines and postal routes, the 
erection of schools and hospitals, in furnishing trees to 
the planters and machinery and live-stock to the farmers, 
and in assisting immigration. So, if keeping everlast- 
ingly at it brings success, I cannot but feel that the day 
will come when these officers and officials, these soldiers 
and settlers, these traders and tribesmen, will find their 
places and play their parts in the Kaiser's imperial 
scheme of a new and greater Germany over the sea. 



189 



CHAPTER VIII 

"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!^' 

IN Bulawayo, which is in Matabeleland, stands one of 
the most significant and impressive statues in the 
world. From the middle of that dusty, sun-baked 
thoroughfare known as Main Street rises the bronze 
image of a bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, his hands 
clasped behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as 
he stares in profound meditation northward over Africa. 
Cecil John Rhodes was the dreamer's name, and in his 
vision he saw twin lines of steel stretching from the Cape 
of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Med- 
iterranean; a railway, to use his own words, "cutting 
Africa through the centre and picking up trade all the 
way." 

If ever a man was a strange blending of dreamer 
and materialist, of Utopian and buccaneer, of Clive and 
Hastings with Hawkins and Drake, it was Cecil Rhodes. 
In other words, he dreamed great dreams and let no 
scruples stand in the way of their fulfilment. Having 
trekked over nearly the whole of that vast territory that 
stretches northward from the Orange and the Vaal to 
the shores of Lake Tanganyika, his imagination saw in 
this fertile, sparsely settled country virgin soil for the 
building up of a new and greater Britain. The pre- 
dominance of the British in Egypt and in South Africa, 

190 



"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!" 

and the fact that the territory under British control 
stretched with but a single break from the mouths of the 
Nile to Table Bay, gave rise in the great empire-builder's 
mind to the project of a trunk-line railway "from the 
Cape to Cairo," and under the British flag all the way. 
Though Rhodes's dream of an "All Red" railway was 
rudely shattered by the Convention of 1889, which al- 
lowed Germany to stretch a barrier across the continent 
from the Indian Ocean to the Congo State, he never 
abandoned the hope that a British zone would eventu- 
ally be acquired through German East Africa, either by 
treaty or purchase, even going so far as to open negoti- 
ations with the Kaiser to this end on his own initiative. 
It was a picturesque vision, said the men to whom 
he confided his dream, but impractical and impossible, 
for in those days the line from Alexandria to Assuan and 
another from Cape Town to Kimberley practically com- 
prised the railway system of the continent, and five 
thousand miles of unmapped forest, desert, and jungle, 
filled with hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly 
fevers, lay between. But the man who had added to 
the British Empire a territory greater than France, Ger- 
many, Austria-Hungary, and Italy combined; who had 
organised the corporation controlling the South African 
diamond fields; who had put down a formidable native 
uprising by going unarmed and unaccompanied into 
the rebel camp; and who was responsible, more than 
any other person, for the Boer War, was not of the stamp 
which is daunted by either pessimistic predictions or 
obvious obstacles. 

191 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

It was a slow and disheartening business at first, 
this building of a railway with a soul-inspiring name. 
The discovery of the diamond fields had already brought 
the line up to Kimberley; the finding of gold carried 
it northward again to the Rand; the opening up of 
Rhodesia led the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and 
there it stopped, apparently for good. But Rhodes 
was undiscouraged. He felt that to push the railway 
northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of 
Lake Tanganyika was an obvious and necessary enter- 
prise — the actual proof, as it were, of the British occu- 
pation. But the Boer War was scarcely over, the 
national purse was drained almost dry, and even the 
most optimistic financiers shrank from the enormous 
expense and problematical success of building a railway 
into the heart of a savage and unknown country. 

Finally Rhodes turned to the imperial government 
for assistance in this imperial enterprise, for the man 
who had added Zululand, Bechuanaland, Matabele- 
land, Mashonaland, Barotseland, and Nyasaland to 
the empire felt that the empire owed him something 
in return. He first laid his scheme before Lord Salis- 
bury, then prime minister, who said that nothing could 
be done until he had a closer estimate of the expense. 
Returning to Central Africa, Rhodes had a flying sur- 
vey of the route made in double-quick time, and with 
the figures in his pocket hastened back to London. 
This time the premier sent him to see Sir Michael Hicks- 
Beach, the chancellor of the exchequer. Hicks-Beach, 
who was notorious for his parsimony in the expenditure 

192 



"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!" 

of national funds, was frigid and discouraging, but 
finally relaxed enough to say: "Get a proper survey 
made of your proposed railway, with estimates drawn 
up by responsible engineers, and if the figure is not too 
unreasonable we will see what can be done. " Fortified 
with this shred of hope, Rhodes again betook himself 
to the country north of the Zambezi, and, after months 
of work, hardship, and privation, facing death from 
native spears, poisonous snakes, and the sleeping-sick- 
ness, his men weakened by malaria and his animals 
killed by the dreaded tsetse-fly, he returned to England 
and presented his revised surveys and estimates to 
the chancellor of the exchequer. That immaculately 
clad statesman negligently twirled his eye-glass on its 
string as he regarded with obvious disfavour the fever- 
sunken cheeks and unkempt appearance of the pioneer. 
" Really, Mr. Rhodes, " he remarked coldly, " I fear it is 
quite out of the question for her Majesty's government 
to lend your scheme its countenance or assistance." 
It is a pleasingly human touch that as the indignant 
empire-builder went out of the minister's room he 
slammed the door so that the pictures rattled on the 
wall. 

After dinner that night Rhodes strolled over to see 
a friend of Kimberley days, a Hebrew financier named 
Alfred Beit, in whom he found a sympathetic hstener. 
As Rhodes took his hat to go, Beit casually remarked, 
"Look here, Rhodes, you'll want a start. Four and a 
half milHon pounds is a big sum to raise. We'll do half 
a million of it, Wernher [his partner] and I." That 

193 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

meant success. Though ministers of the Crown turned 
a cold shoulder to the great imperiaHst who came to 
them with a great imperial enterprise, help came from 
two German Jews who had become naturalised English- 
men. The next day the City brought the total up to 
a million and a half, and within little more than a fort- 
night the entire four and a half millions were subscribed, 
the three names, Rhodes, Beit, and Wernher, being 
accepted by the man in the street as sufficient guarantee 
of success. It was in this fashion that Cecil Rhodes 
raised the money for another great stride in his railway 
march northward. 

By 1904 the road had progressed as far as the Vic- 
toria Falls of the Zambezi, where it crosses the river on a 
wonderful steel-arch bridge — the highest in the world — 
its span, looking for all the world like a frosted cobweb, 
rising four hundred and twenty feet above the angry 
waters. "I want the bridge to cross the river so close 
to the falls," directed Rhodes, "that the travellers 
will have the spray in their faces." "That is impossi- 
ble," objected the engineers. "What you ask cannot 
be done. " "Then I will find some one who can do it, " 
said Rhodes — and he did. The bridge was built where 
he wanted it, and as the Zambezi Express rolls out above 
the torrent the passengers have to close the windows to 
keep from being drenched with spray. By 1906 the 
rail-head had been pushed forward to Broken Hill, a 
mining centre in northern Rhodesia; three years later 
found it at Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo border. 
Here the task of construction was taken up by the 

194 



"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!" 

Katanga Railway Company, and in February, 191 1, 
freight and passenger trains were in operation straight 
through to EHsabethville, in the heart of the Belgian 
Congo, two thousand three hundred and sixteen miles 
north of Cape Town and only two hundred and eighty 
miles from the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. 

As you sit on the observation platform of your 
electric-hghted sleeping-car, anywhere along that sec- 
tion of the "Cape-to-Cairo" between Cape Town and 
the Zambezi, you rub your eyes incredulously as you 
watch the rolling, verdure-clad plains stretching away 
to the foot-hills of distant ranges, and note the entire 
absence of those dense forests and steaming jungles 
which have always been associated, in the minds of 
most of us, with Central Africa. The more you see 
of this open, homely, rather monotonous country the 
harder it becomes for you to convince yourself that you 
are really in the heart of that mysterious,, storied Dark 
Continent and not back in America again. 

And the illusion is completed by the people, for the 
only natives you see are careless, happy, decently clad 
darkies who might have come straight from the levees 
of Vicksburg or New Orleans, while on every station 
platform are groups of fine, bronze-faced, up-standing 
fellows in corded riding-breeches and brown boots, their 
flannel shirts open at the neck, their broad-brimmed 
hats cocked rakishly — just such types, indeed, as were 
common beyond the Mississippi twenty years ago, be- 
fore store clothes and the motor-car had spoiled the 
picturesqueness of our own frontier. 

195 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

North of the Zambezi it is a different story, how- 
ever, for there it is frontier still, with many of a frontier's 
drawbacks, for the prices of necessities are exorbitant 
and of luxuries fantastic; skilled workmen can com- 
mand almost any wages they may ask, and common 
labour is both scarce and poor. The miner, the scien- 
tifically trained farmer, and the skilled workman have 
rich opportunities in this quarter of Africa, however, 
for the mineral wealth is amazing, much of the soil is 
excellent, and civilisation is advancing over a great area 
with three-league boots. 

For excitement, variety, and picturesqueness I 
doubt if the journey through Barotseland and the 
Katanga district of the Congo can be equalled on any 
railway in the world. It is true that the Uganda Rail- 
way — ^which, by the way, does not touch Uganda at all 
— ^has been better advertised, but in quantity of game 
and facilities for hunting it the territory through which 
it runs is no whit superior to that traversed by the 
" Cape-to-Cairo. " Stroll a mile up or down the Zambezi 
from the railway bridge and you can see hippos as easily 
as you can at the Zoo in Central Park; in Northwest 
Rhodesia herds of bush-buck, zebras, and ostriches 
scamper away at sight of the train; and as you he in 
your sleeping-berth at night, while the train halts on 
lonely sidings, you can hear the roar of lions and see 
the gleam of the camp-fires by means of which the 
railway employees keep them away. On one occasion, 
when our train was lying on a siding south of the 
Zambezi, the conductor of the dining-car suddenly 

196 



"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!" 

exclaimed, "Look there, gentlemen — look over there!" 
His excitement was justified, for from over a screen of 
bushes, scarcely a biscuit's throw away, a herd of five 
giraffes craned their preposterous necks and peered at 
us curiously. Once, when I was travelling through 
Northwest Rhodesia, our engine struck a bull elephant 
which had decided to contest the right of way. As the 
train was running at full speed, both engine and ele- 
phant went off the track. Returning that way some 
days later, we noted that the local station-master had 
scraped the gargantuan skull to the bone, filled it with 
earth, and set it on the station platform as a jardiniere 
to grow geraniums in. He was an ingenious fellow. 

From the Cairo end, meanwhile, the northern sec- 
tion of the great transcontinental system was being 
pushed steadily, if slowly, southward. The difficulties 
of river transportation experienced by the two Sudanese 
expeditions had proved conclusively that if the Sudan 
was ever to be opened up to European exploitation it 
must be by rail rather than by river. It was the Kha- 
lifa who was unconsciously responsible for the rapid 
completion of much of the Sudanese section of the 
" Cape-to-Cairo, " for, in order to come to hand-grips 
with him. Kitchener and his soldiers pushed the railway 
down the desert to Khartoum at record speed, laying 
close on two miles of track between each sunrise and 
sunset. There it halted for a number of years ; but after 
the British had done their work, and Khartoum had 
been transformed from a town of blood, lust, and fa- 
naticism into a city with broad, shaded streets, along 

197 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

which stalks law and order in the khaki tunic of a Sudan- 
ese policeman, the railway-building fever, which affects 
some men as irresistibly as the Wanderlust does others, 
took hold of Those Who Have the Say, and the line was 
again pushed southward, along the banks of the Blue 
Nile, to Sennar, one hundred and fifty-eight miles south 
of Khartoum. With the completion, in 1910, of several 
iron bridges, it was advanced to Kosti, a post on the 
White Nile, with the northern end of Lake Tanganyika 
some twelve hundred miles away. 

That a few more years will see the northern section 
extending southward, via Gondokoro, to Lake Victoria 
Nyanza, and the southern section northward to Lake 
Tanganyika, there is little doubt. Indeed, the plans 
are drawn, the routes mapped, the levels run, and on 
the Katanga-Tanganyika section the railway-builders 
are even now at work. But when the Victoria Nyanza 
has been reached by the one section, and Tanganyika 
by the other, there wiU come a halt, for between the two 
rail-heads there will still be six hundred miles of inter- 
vening territory — and that territory is German. 

Unless, therefore, England can obtain, by treaty 
or purchase, a railway zone across German East Africa, 
such as we have obtained for the Canal across the 
Isthmus of Panama, it looks very much as though there 
would never be an all-British railway from the Medi- 
terranean to the Cape, and as though the life dream of 
Cecil John Rhodes would vanish into thin air. There 
are several reasons why Germany is not inclined to give 
England the much-desired right of way. First, because 

198 



"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!" 

between the two nations a bitter rivalry, political and 
commercial, exists, and the Germans feel that already 
far too much of the continent is under the shadow of the 
Union Jack; secondly, because the Germans are, as I 
have already mentioned in the preceding chapter, them- 
selves building a railway from Dar-es-Salam, the capital 
of their east-coast colony, to Lake Tanganyika, and by 
means of this Hne they expect to divert to their own 
ports the trade of all that portion of inner Africa lying 
between Rhodesia and the Sudan; thirdly, because it is 
unlikely in the extreme that England would give Ger- 
many such a quid pro quo as she would demand — as, 
for example, the cession of Walfish Bay, the British port 
in German Southwest Africa, or of the British protec- 
torate of Zanzibar, or of both; fourthly, because the 
Germans now have the British in just such a predica- 
ment regarding the completion of the " Cape-to-Cairo " 
railway as the British have the Germans regarding the 
completion of the Bagdad railway. In other words, 
the only condition on which either country will permit 
its rival's railway to be built through its territory is 
internationahsation. 

That there will ever be an all-British railway from 
the Mediterranean to the Cape seems to me exceedingly 
doubtful, for the pohtical, territorial, and financial 
obstacles are many, and not easily to be disposed of; 
but that the not-far-distant future will see the comple- 
tion, under international auspices, of this great trans- 
continental trunk line seems to me to be as certain as 
that the locomotive sparks fly upward or that the hoar- 
I 199 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

frost on the rails disappears before the sun. Rhodes 
always said that the success of such a system must 
largely depend on the junctions to the east and west 
coasts, which would affect such a line very much as 
tributary streams affect a river. A number of such 
feeders are already in operation and others are rapidly 
building. Beginning at the north, the main line of the 
" Cape- to- Cairo " is tapped at Cairo by the railways from 
Port Said and Suez; and at Atbara Junction, in the 
Sudan, a constantly increasing stream of traffic flows 
in over the hne from Port Sudan, a harbour recently 
built to order on the Red Sea. The misnamed Uganda 
Railway is in regular operation between Mombasa on 
the Indian Ocean and Port Florence on the Victoria 
Nyanza, whence there is a steamer service to Entebbe 
in Uganda. From Dar-es-Salam, the capital of German 
East Africa, the Germans are rushing a railway through 
to Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the engineer- 
in-chief assuring me that it would be completed and in 
operation by the summer of 19 14. From Beira, in 
Portuguese East Africa, the Beira, Mashonaland, and 
Rhodesia Railway carries an enormous stream of traffic 
inland to its junction with the main line at Bulawayo. 
Still farther south a line from the Portuguese posses- 
sion of Delagoa Bay connects with the main system 
at Maf eking, on the borders of Bechuanaland, while 
Kimberley is the junction for a line from Durban, in 
Natal, and De Aar for feeders from East London and 
Port Elizabeth, in Cape of Good Hope. 

From Swakopmund, on the other side of the con- 
200 



"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!" 

tinent, a railway has already been pushed nearly five 
hundred miles into the interior of German Southwest 
Africa which will eventually link up with the " Cape- to- 
Cairo" in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls, running 
through German territory practically all the way. Still 
another line is being built inland from Lobito Bay in 
Angola (Portuguese West Africa) to join the transcon- 
tinental system near the Congo border, nearly half of its 
total length of twelve hundred miles being completed. 
It is estimated that by means of this line the journey 
between England and the cities of the Rand will be 
shortened by at least six days. It will be seen, there- 
fore, that the " Cape-to-Cairo " system will have eleven 
great feeders, eight of which are already completed and 
in operation, while all of the remaining four will be 
carrying freight and passengers before the close of 
1914. 

When the last rail of the " Cape-to-Cairo " is laid, 
and the last spike driven, its builders may say, without 
fear of contradiction, "In all the world no road like 
this." And in the nature of things it is impossible 
that there can ever be its like again, for there will be 
no more continents to open up, no more frontiers to 
conquer. It will start on the sandy shores of the Medi- 
terranean and end under the shadow of Table Moun- 
tain. In between, it will pass through jungle, swamp, 
and desert; it will zigzag across plains where elephants 
play by day and lions roar by night; it will corkscrew 
up the slopes of snow-capped mountains, meander 
through the cultivated patches of strange inland tribes, 

201 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

stride long-legged athwart treacherous, pestilential 
swamps, plough through the darkness of primeval for- 
ests,- and stretch its length across the rolling, wind-swept 
veldt, until it finally ends in the great antipodean me- 
tropolis on the edge of the Southern Ocean. On its way 
it traverses nearly seventy degrees of latitude, samples 
every climate, touches every degree of temperature, 
experiences every extreme. At Gondokoro, in the 
swamp-lands of the Sudd, the red-fezzed engine-driver 
will lean gasping from his bhstered cab; at Kimberley, 
in the highlands of the Rand, he will stamp with 
numbed feet and blow with chattering teeth on his 
half -frozen fingers. 

The traveller who climbs into the Cape-to-Cairo 
Limited at the Quay Station in Alexandria, in response 
to the conductor's cry of "All aboard! All aboard for 
Cape Town!" can lean from the window of his compart- 
ment as the train approaches Cairo and see the misty 
outUnes of the Pyramids, those mysterious monuments 
of antiquity which were hoary with age when London 
was a cluster of mud huts and Paris was yet to be 
founded in the swamps beside the Seine; at Luxor he 
will pass beneath the shadow of ruined Thebes, a city 
beside which Athens and Rome are ludicrously modern; 
at Assuan he will catch a ghmpse of the greatest dam 
ever built by man — a mile and a quarter long and built 
of masonry weighing a million tons — holding in check 
the waters of the longest river in the world; at Khar- 
toum, peering through the blue-glass windows which 
protect the passengers' eyes from the bhnding sun 

202 



"ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!" 

glare, he can see the statue of Gordon, seated on his 
bronze camel, peering northward across the desert in 
search of the white helmets that came too late; at 
Entebbe his eyes will be dazzled by the shimmering 
waters of the Victoria Nyanza, barring Lake Superior 
the greatest of all fresh- water seas; at Ujiji he will see 
natives in German uniforms drilling on the spot where 
Stanley discovered Livingstone. He will hold his 
breath in awe as the train rolls out over the Victoria 
Falls of the Zambezi, for there will lie below him the 
mightiest cataract in the world — an unbroken sheet 
of falling, roaring, smoking water, two and a half times 
the height and ten times the width of the American Fall 
at Niagara; at Kimberley he will see the great pits in 
the earth which supply the women of the world with 
diamonds; in the outskirts of Johannesburg he will see 
the mountains of ore from which comes one-third of the 
gold supply of the world. And finally, when his train 
has at last come to a halt under the glass roof of the 
Victoria Terminal in Cape Town, with close on six 
thousand miles of track behind it, the traveller, if he 
has any imagination and any appreciation in his soul, 
will make a httle pilgrimage to that spot on the slopes 
of Table Mountain known as "World's View," where 
another statue of that same bulky, thick-set, shabbily 
clad man, this time guarded by many British lions, 
stares northward over Africa. He will take his stand 
in front of that mighty memorial and, lifting his hat, mil 
say: "You, sir, were a great man, the greatest this be- 
nighted continent has ever known, and if one day it is 

203 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

transformed into a land of civilisation, of peace, and of 
prosperity, it will be due, more than anything else, to 
the great iron highway, from the Nile's mouth to the 
continent's end, which is the fulfilment of your dream. " 



204 



CHAPTER IX 
THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

WHEN the penniless younger son of the English 
society play is jilted by the luxury-loving hero- 
ine, he invariably packs his portmanteau and betakes 
himself to Rhodesia to make his fortune. Fifty years 
ago he sought the golden fleece in CaHfornia; thirty 
years ago he took passage by P. & 0. boat for the Aus- 
trahan diggings; ten years ago he helped to swell the 
mad rush to the Yukon; to-day his journey's end is the 
newest of the great, new nations — Rhodesia. He re- 
turns in the fourth act, broad-hatted, bronzed, and 
boisterous, to announce that he is the owner of a ten- 
thousand-acre farm, or a diamond field, or a gold mine, 
or all of them, and that he has come home to find a girl 
to share his farm-house on the Rhodesian veldt, where 
good cooking is more essential in a wife than good 
clothes and a good complexion. 

Now, beyond having a vague idea that Rhodesia 
is a frontier country somewhere at the back of beyond, 
there is only about one in every fifty of the audience 
who has any definite notion where or what it really is. 
Picture, then, if you can, a territory about the size of all 
the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put to- 
gether, with the dry, dusty, sunny chmate of southern 
CaUf omia and the fertile, rolling, well- watered, and well- 

205 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

wooded surface of Indiana; picture such a country- 
dropped down in the heart of equatorial Africa — that is 
Rhodesia. It Hes a Httle above and to the right of that 
speckled yellow patch on the map of Africa which was 
labelled in our school geographies the Kalahari Desert. 
Bearing the name of the great empire-builder is the 
whole of that region which is bounded on the north 
by the Congo and the sleeping-sickness, on the east by 
Mozambique and the black- water fever, on the west by 
Angola and the cocoa atrocities, and on the south by the 
Transvaal and the discontented Dutch. It is watered 
by the Limpopo, which forms its southernmost boun- 
dary; by the Zambezi, which separates Southern Rhode- 
sia from the northeast and northwest provinces; and 
by the innumerable streams which unite to form the 
Congo. 

When the railway which English concessionaires 
are now pushing inland from the coast of Angola to the 
Zambezi is completed, the front door to Rhodesia will 
be Lobito Bay, thus bringing Bulawayo within sixteen 
days of the Strand by boat and rail. At present, how- 
ever, the country must be entered through the cellar, 
which means Cape Town and a railway journey of 
fourteen hundred miles; or by the side door at Beira, a 
fever-stricken Portuguese town on the East Coast, 
which is fortunate in being but a night's journey by rail 
from the Rhodesian frontier and is, in consequence, the 
gateway through which British jams, American har- 
vesters, and German jack-knives are opening up inner 
Africa to foreign exploitation. 

206 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

The Rhodesia-bound traveller who escapes landing 
at Beira in a basket is fortunate, for it has a poorly shel- 
tered harbour and neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, so 
that in the monsoon months, when the great combers 
come roaring in from the Indian Ocean mountain-high, 
there is about as much chance of getting the steam ten- 
der alongside the rolling liner as there is of getting a 
frightened horse alongside a panting automobile. If 
a dangerous sea is running, the disembarking passenger 
is put into a cylindrical, elongated basket, a sort of en- 
larged edition of those used for soiled towels in the 
lavatories of hotels; a wheezing donkey-engine swings 
it up and outward and, if the man at the lever calculates 
the roll of the ship correctly, drops it with a thud on 
the deck of the tender plunging off-side. 

Built on a stretch of sun-baked sand, between a 
miasmal jungle and the sea, Beira is the hottest and un- 
healthiest place in all East Africa. "It is one of the 
places that the Lord has overlooked," -remarked a sal- 
low-faced resident, as he took his hourly dose of quinine. 
Even the paid-to-be-enthusiastic author of the steam- 
ship company's glowing booklet hesitates at depicting 
this fever-haunted, sun-baked, sand-suffocated seaport 
of Mozambique, contenting himself with the non- 
committal statement that "it is indescribable; it is just 
Beira. " The town has but three attractions: a broad- 
verandaed hotel where they charge you forty cents for 
a lemonade with no ice in it; a golf course, laid out by 
a newly arrived Enghshman, who died of sunstroke the 
first day he played on it; and a trolley system which 

207 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

makes every resident the owner of his own street-car. 
The heat in Beira being too great to permit of walking 
— a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to one 
hundred and twenty degrees; the streets being too deep 
in sand for the use of vehicles; and the tsetse-fly killing 
off horses in a few days, those European traders and 
officials who are condemned to dwell in Beira get about 
in "trolleys" of their own. These two-seated, hooded 
conveyances, which are a sort of cross between a hand- 
car, a baby-carriage, and the wheeled chairs on the board 
walk at Atlantic City, are pushed by half-naked and 
perspiring natives over a track which extends from one 
end of the town to the other and with sidings into every 
man's front yard. It struck me, however, that the most 
interesting things in Beira were the corrugated-iron 
shanty and the stretch of wooden platform which mark 
the terminus of the railway, and from which, in answer 
to my anxious queries, I was assured that a train de- 
parted twice weekly for Salisbury, the capital of Rhode- 
sia. I used to sit on the veranda of the hotel and stare 
across the stretch of burning sand at that wretched 
station as longingly as the small boy stares at the red 
numeral on the calendar which indicates the Fourth 
of July. 

A temperature of one hundred and eighteen degrees 
in my compartment of the sleeping-car; miasma rising 
in cloud wreaths from the jungle; a station platform, 
alive with slovenly Portuguese soldiers with faces as 
yellow as their uniforms; helmeted, gaunt-cheeked tra- 
ders and oflScials, and cotton-clad SwahiUs, comprised 

208 




'The passenger landing at Beira is put into a cylindrical basket and dropped with a thud on the deck of 
the tender plunging off-side." 




Where every man is hisown tracliDn maL'nalc. In IJeira, I'ortuKUcse East Africa, every European res 
dent owns his own street-car. 



BEIRA, A PLACE THAT THE LORD EORGOT. 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

my last recollection of Beira and the terrible East Coast. 
The next morning I awoke in my compartment shiver- 
ing, not from fever but from cold. Gone, as though in 
a bad dream, were the glaring sands, the steaming jun- 
gle, and the sallow, fever-racked men. Instead, my 
car window framed a picture of rolling, grass-covered 
uplands, dotted here and there with herds of grazing 
cattle and substantial, whitewashed farm-houses, while 
back of all was the gray-blue of distant mountains. As 
I looked at the transformed landscape incredulously, 
the train halted at a way-station swarming with broad- 
hatted, flannel-shirted, sun-tanned men with clean-cut 
Anglo-Saxon faces. A row of saddle-horses were tied 
to the station fence, while their owners stamped up and 
down the platform impatiently, awaiting the sorting of 
the infrequent mail from home; a democrat wagon and 
a clumsy Cape cart were drawn up in the roadway; 
and at a house close by a woman in a sunbonnet was 
feeding chickens. "Where are we?" I inquired of the 
guard, as he passed through the train. "We're just 
into Rhodesia now, sir," said he, touching his cap. 
"This is Umtah, in Mashonaland. " (Now, if I had 
asked that same question of a brakeman on one of our 
own railways, he would probably have answered, with 
the independence of his kind: " Can't you read the sign 
on the station for yourself?") "Surely there must be 
some mistake," I said to myself. "This cannot be 
Central Africa, for where are the impenetrable jungles 
through which Livingstone cut his way, the savage 
animals which Du Chaillu shot, and the naked savages 

209 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

with whom Stanley alternately battled and bartered? 
This is not Africa; this is our own West, with its men in 
corduroy and sombreros and its women in gingham, with 
its open, rolhng prairies and its air like dry champagne. " 
Indeed, throughout my stay in Rhodesia I could not rid 
myself of the impression that I was back in the Ameri- 
can West of thirty years ago, before the pioneer, the 
prospector, and the cow-puncher had retreated before 
the advance of the railway, the harvester, and the 
motor-car. 

The story of the taking and making of Rhodesia 
forms one of the most picturesque and thrilling chapters 
in the history of England's colonial expansion. About 
the time that the nineteenth century had reached its 
turning-point, a strange tale, passing by word of mouth 
from native kraal to native kraal, came at last to the 
ears of a Scotch worker in the mission field of Bechu- 
analand. It was a tale of a waterfall somewhere in 
the jungles of the distant north; a waterfall so mighty, 
declared the natives, that the spray from it looked like a 
storm cloud on the horizon and the thunder of its waters 
could be heard four days' trek away. So the mission- 
ary, wearied with the tedium of proselyting amid a 
peaceful people and restless with the curiosity of the 
born explorer, set out on a long and lonely march to 
the northward, through a country which no white man's 
eyes had ever seen. It took him three years to reach 
the falls for which he started, but when at last he stood 
upon the brink of the canyon and looked down upon the 
waters of the Zambezi as they hurtled over four hundred 

2IO 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

feet of sheerest cliff, he was so awed by their majesty 
and their beauty that he named them after Victoria, the 
young EngUsh queen. Before he left the missionary- 
explorer carved his name on the trunk of a near-by tree, 
where it can be seen to-day; the name is David Living- 
stone. 

For a quarter of a century the regions adjacent to 
the Zambezi were disturbed only by migratory bands of 
natives and marauding animals. Then Stanley came 
with his mile-long caravan of porters, halting long 
enough to explore and map the region, on his historic 
march from coast to coast. In the middle eighties a 
young EngHsh prospector, trekking through the coun- 
try with a single wagon, found that for which he was 
seeking — gold. Likewise he saw that its verdure-clad 
prairies would support many cattle and that its virgin 
soil was adapted for many kinds of crops; that it was, 
in short, a white man's country. Unarmed and un- 
accompanied, he penetrated to the kraal of Lobenguela, 
the chief of the warlike Matabele, who occupied the 
region, and induced him to sign a treaty placing his 
country under British protection. The price paid him 
was five hundred dollars a month and a thousand an- 
tiquated rifles; cheap enough, surely, for a territory 
three times the size of Texas and as rich in natural re- 
sources as California. A year later the British South 
Africa Company, a corporation capitalised at thirty 
milhon dollars, under a charter granted by the Imperial 
Government, began the work of exploiting the conces- 
sion; naming it, properly enough, after Cecil John 

211 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Rhodes, the lone prospector who, with the vision of a 
prophet, had foreseen its possibihties and by whose 
unaided efforts it had been obtained. Such was the 
first step in Rhodes's poHcy of British expansion north- 
ward — a policy so successful that in his own hfetime 
he saw the frontiers of British Africa pushed from the 
Orange River to the Nile. 

To hand over a colonial possession, its inhabitants 
and its resources, to be administered and exploited by 
a private corporation, sounds like a strange proceeding 
to American ears. Imagine turning the Philippines 
over to the Standard Oil Company and giving that cor- 
poration permission to appoint its own officials, make 
its own laws, assess its own taxes, and maintain its 
own mifitary force in those islands. That, roughly 
speaking, was about what England did when she turned 
Rhodesia over to the chartered company. It should be 
remembered, however, that, beginning when the Euro- 
pean nations were entering upon an era of economic ex- 
ploration of hitherto virgin territories, these chartered 
companies have played a large part in the history of 
colonisation in general and in the upbuilding of the 
British Empire in particular, though in the great 
majority of cases it was trade, not empire, at which they 
aimed. Warned, however, by the fashion in which the 
East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company 
abused their power, the British Government keeps a 
jealous eye on the activities of the Rhodesian conces- 
sionaires, their charter, while conferring broad trading 
privileges and great administrative powers, differing 

212 




Natives of Barotseland fighting with " knobkerries.' 




Scene in Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. 
THE OLD LIFE AND THE NEW IN RHODESIA. 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

from earlier instruments in neither delegating sover- 
eignty nor granting an exclusive monopoly. 

The Rhodesia protectorate is the result of the con- 
solidation of four great native kingdoms : Mashonaland 
in the southeast, Matabeleland in the southwest, 
Barotseland in the northwest, and in the northeast a 
portion of the now separately administered protecto- 
rate of Nyasaland. Practically the whole country is 
an elevated veldt, or plateau, ranging from three thou- 
sand five hundred to five thousand feet above sea-level; 
studded with granite kopjes which in the south attain 
to the dignity of a mountain chain; well watered by 
tributaries of the Congo, the Zambezi, and the Limpopo; 
and covered with a luxuriant vegetation. Like CaH- 
fornia, Southern Rhodesia has a unique and hospitable 
chmate, free from the dangerous heats of an African 
summer and from cold winds in winter. Though the 
climate of nearly all of Southern Rhodesia is suitable 
for Europeans, much of the trans-Zambezi provinces, 
especially along the river valleys and in the low-l3dng, 
swampy regions near the great equatorial lakes, reeks 
\\dth malaria, while in certain other areas, now carefully 
dehmited and guarded by governmental regulation, 
the tsetse-fly commits terrible ravages among cattle and 
horses and the sleeping-sickness among men. The ch- 
mate as a whole, however, is characterised by a rather 
remarkable equability of temperature, especially when 
it is remembered that Rhodesia extends from the bor- 
ders of the temperate zone to within a few degrees of 
the equator. At Sahsbury, the capital, for example, the 

213 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

mean July temperature is 57.5° and for January 70.5°, 
the extremes for the year ranging from 34° to 93°. It is 
a significant fact, however, that the glowing prospec- 
tuses of the chartered company touch but lightly on the 
chmatic conditions which prevail north of the Zambezi, 
a region from which, it struck me, the European settler 
who does not possess a system that is proof against every 
form of tropical fever, a head that is proof against sun- 
stroke, and a mind which is proof against that often- 
times fatal form of homesickness which the army sur- 
geons call nostalgia, is much more likely to go home 
in a cofiin than in a cabine de luxe. 

In mines of gold, of silver, and of diamonds Rhode- 
sia is very rich; agriculturally it is very fertile, for in 
addition to the native crops of rice, tobacco, cotton, 
and india-rubber, the fruits, vegetables, and cereals of 
Europe and America are profitably grown. The great 
fields of maize, or "mealies," as all South Africans call 
it, through which my train frequently passed, constantly 
reminded me of scenes in our own "corn belt"; but in 
the watch-towers which rise from every corn-field, atop 
of which an armed Kaffir sits day and night to protect 
the crops from the raids of wild pigs and baboons, 
Rhodesia has a feature which she is welcome to con- 
sider exclusively her own. 

Though Rhodesia is distinctly a frontier country, 
with many of a frontier's defects, her towns — Salisbury, 
Bulawayo, UmtaH, and the rest — are not frontier towns 
as we knew them in Butte, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and 
Carson City. There are saloons, of course, but they 

214 










'Katanga or bust!" A pioneer trekking northward across the Rhodesian veldt in the rainy season 
to the gold-fields of the Congo. 




'His Majesty's mails." A Rhodesian mail-coach crossing a flooded river in the rainy seasoa. 
LIFE ON THE LAST FRONTIER. 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

are not of the "gin palace" variety, nor did it strike me 
that intoxication was particularly common; certainly 
nothing like what it used to be during the gold-rush 
days in Alaska or in our own West. This may be due 
to the fantastic prices charged for liquor — a whiskey- 
and-soda costs sixty cents — and then again it may be 
due to the fact that most of the settlers have brought 
their families with them, so that, instead of spending 
their evenings leaning over green tables or pohshed bars, 
they devote them to cricket, gardening, or a six-weeks- 
old English paper. Though nearly every one goes 
armed, the streets of the Rhodesian towns are as peace- 
able as Commonwealth Avenue, in Boston, on a Sunday 
morning. Indeed, the commandant of poHce in Bula- 
wayo assured me that he had had only one shooting 
affray during his term of office. In Rhodesia, should a 
man draw his gun as the easiest means of setthng a 
quarrel, his companions, instead of responding by draw- 
ing theirs, would probably call a constable and have him 
bound over to keep the peace. Even the rights of the 
natives are rigidly safeguarded by law, an American 
settler in Umtah complaining to me most bitterly that 
"it's more dangerous for a white man to kick a nigger 
down here than it is for him to kill one in the States. " 
Now, all this was rather disappointing for one who, like 
myself, was on the lookout for the local colour and pic- 
turesqueness and whoop-her-up-boys excitement which 
one naturally associates with hfe on a frontier; but I 
might have expected just what I found, for wherever 
the flag of England flies, whether over the gold-miners 

215 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

of the Yukon, the ivory-traders of Uganda, or the set- 
tlers of Rhodesia, there will be found the deep-seated 
respect of the EngHshman for English order and Eng- 
lish law. 

In my opinion the country club, more than any 
other single factor, has contributed most to the making, 
socially and morally, of Rhodesia. Though the Amer- 
ican West is dotted with just such towns as Salisbury, 
Bulawayo, Gwelo, and Umtali, with the same Hmita- 
tions, pitfalls, and possibilities, the men's centre of in- 
terest, after the day's work is over, is the saloon, the 
dance-hall, or the barber-shop with a pool-room in the 
rear. They do things differently in central Africa. In 
every Rhodesian town large enough to support one — 
and the same is true of all Britain's colonial possessions 
— I found that a "sports club" had been established 
on the edge of the town. Often it was nothing but 
a ramshackle shed or cottage that had been given a 
coat of paint and had a veranda added, but files of the 
English newspapers and illustrated weeklies were to be 
found inside, while from the tea tables on the veranda 
one overlooked half a dozen tennis courts, a cricket 
ground, and a foot-ball field. It is here that the set- 
tlers — men, women, and children— congregate toward 
evening, to discuss the crop prospects, the local taxes, 
the latest gold discoveries, and, above all else, the 
news contained in the weekly mail from home. Why 
have not our own progressive prairie towns some 
simple social system like this? It was in speaking of 
this very thing that the mayor of Sahsbury — ^himself 

216 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

an American — remarked: "In the little, every-day 
things which make for successful colonisation of a new 
country, you fellows in the States are twenty years 
behind us." 

Living is expensive in Rhodesia, the prices of 
necessaries usually being high and of luxuries ofttimes 
fantastic. To counterbalance this, however, wages are 
extraordinarily high. It is useless to attempt to quote 
wages, for the farther up-country a man gets the higher 
pay he can command, so I will content myself with the 
bare statement that for the skilled workman, be he car- 
penter, blacksmith, mason, or wheelwright, larger wages 
are to be earned than in any part of the world that I 
know. The same is true of the man who has had prac- 
tical experience in agriculture or stock-raising, there be- 
ing a steady demand for men conversant with dairying, 
cattle-breeding, and irrigation. Let me drive home and 
copper-rivet the fact, however, that in Rhodesia, as in 
nearly aU new countries, where there is a considerable 
native population to draw upon, there is no place for 
the unskilled labourer. 

For the man with resource and a little capital there 
are many roads to wealth in British Africa. I know of 
one, formerly a laundry employee in Chicago, who 
landed in Rhodesia with limited capital but unlimited 
confidence.^ Recognising that the country had arrived 
at that stage of civilisation where the people were tired 
of wearing flannel shirts, but could not afford to have 
white ones ruined by Kaffir washermen, he started a 
chain of sanitary up-to-date laundries, and is to-day 

217 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

one of the wealthy men of the colony. If you ever had 
to pay one of his laundry bills you would understand 
why. Another American, starting business as a hotel- 
keeper in Salisbury, soon perceived that the people were 
ripe for some form of amusement other than that pro- 
vided by the cricket fields and saloons; so he built a 
string of cinematograph and vaudeville theatres com- 
bined, and to-day, on the very spot where Lobenguela's 
medicine-men performed their bloody rites a dozen 
years ago, you can hear the whir of the moving-picture 
machine and see on the canvas screen a military review 
at Aldershot or a bathing scene at Asbury Park. Still 
another American whom I met has increased the thick- 
ness of his wallet by supplying prospectors and settlers 
with sectional houses which are easily portable and can 
be erected in an hour. Taking the circular, conical- 
roofed hut of the Matabele as his model, he evolved 
an affair of corrugated iron which combines simpHcity, 
portability, and practicabihty with a low price, so that 
to-day, as you travel through Rhodesia, you will see 
these American-made imitations of Kafhr huts dotting 
the veldt. 

Though Rhodesia has a black population of one 
million six hundred thousand, as against twenty thou- 
sand whites, there has thus far been no such thing as 
race troubles or a colour question, due in large measure, 
no doubt, to the firm and just supervision exercised 
by the British resident commissioners. Arms, ammuni- 
tion, and liquor excepted, natives and Europeans are 
under the same conditions. Land has been set apart for 

218 




MORE WORK FOR THE PIONEER. 

In the heart of the jungle in Northeastern Rhodesia, near the Congo border. This is the sort of coun- 
try through which portions of the "Cape-to-Cairo" railway will pass. 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

tribal settlements, the mineral rights being reserved 
to the company, but, if the native occupation is dis- 
turbed, new lands must immediately be assigned, all 
disputes being ultimately referrible to the British high 
commissioner. Those natives living near the towns are 
segregated in settlements of their own, a native under 
no circumstances being permitted to remain within the 
town limits after nightfall, or to enter them in the day- 
time without a pass signed by the commandant of police. 
Though possessing many of the temperamental char- 
acteristics of the American negro, and in particular his 
aversion for manual work, the Rhodesian native is, on 
the whole, honest and trustworthy, a well-disciplined 
and efficient force of native constabulary having been 
recruited from the warlike Barotse and Matabele. 

Highways of steel bisect Rhodesia in both direc- 
tions. From Plumtree, on the borders of Bechuana- 
land, the Rhodesian section of the great Cape-to-Cairo 
system stretches straight across the country to Bwana 
M'kubwa, on the Congo frontier, while another line, 
the Rhodesia, Mashonaland, and Beira, links up, as its 
name indicates, the transcontinental system with the 
East Coast. Though the much-advertised Zambezi 
Express is scarcely the "veritable train de luxe" which 
the railway folders call it, it is a comfortable enough 
train nevertheless, with electric-lighted dining and 
sleeping cars, the latter being fitted, as befits a dusty 
country, with baths. The dining-car tariff is on a 
sHding scale; the farther up-country you travel the 
higher the prices ascend. Between Cape Town and 

219 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Mafeking the charges for meals seemed to me exceed- 
ingly reasonable (fifty cents for breakfast, sixty cents for 
luncheon, and seventy-five cents for dinner); between 
Mafeking and Bulawayo they are only moderate; be- 
tween Bulawayo and the Zambezi they are high; and 
north of the Zambezi — when you can get any food at all 
— the charges for it are exorbitant. When the section 
to Lake Tanganyika is completed only a millionaire 
can afford to enter the dining-car. It speaks volumes 
for the development of British South Africa, however, 
that one can get into a sleeping-car in Cape Town and 
get out of it again, six days later, on the navigable head- 
waters of the Congo, covering the distance of nearly 
two thousand five hundred miles at a total cost of 
eighty dollars — and much of it through a country which 
has been opened to the white man scarcely a dozen 
years. 

Just as every visitor to the United States heads 
straight for Niagara, so every visitor to South Africa 
purchases forthwith a ticket to the Victoria Falls of the 
Zambezi, the mighty cataract in the heart of Rhodesia 
which is the greatest natural wonder in the Dark Con- 
tinent and, perhaps, in the world. The natives call the 
falls Mosi-oa-tunya, which means " Thundering Smoke," 
and you appreciate the name's significance when your 
train halts at daybreak at a wayside station, sixty miles 
away, and you see above the tree-tops a cloud of smoky 
vapour and hear a low humming like a million sewing- 
machines. It is so utterly impossible for the eye, the 
mind, and the imagination to grasp the size, grandeur, 

220 




THE VICTORIA FALLS OF THE ZAMBEZI. 

"A sheet of water forty city blocks in width, or as long as from the Grand Central Station, in New 
York, to Washington Square, hurtling over a precipice twice as high as the Flatiron Building." 



THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER 

and beauty of the Victoria Falls that it is futile to at- 
tempt to describe them. If you can picture an un- 
broken sheet of water forty city blocks in width, or as 
long as from the Grand Central Station, in New York, 
to Washington Square, hurtling over a precipice twice as 
high as the Flatiron Building, you will have the best idea 
that I can give you of what the Victoria Falls are like. 
They are unique in that the level of the land above the 
falls is the same as that below, the entire breadth of the 
second greatest river in Africa falling precipitately into 
a deep and narrow chasm, from which the only outlet 
is an opening "in the rock less than one hundred yards 
wide. From the Boiling Pot, as this seething caldron of 
waters is called, the contents of the Zambezi rush with 
unbridled fury through a deep and narrow gorge of 
basaltic cliffs, which, nowhere inferior to the rapids at 
Niagara, extends with many zigzag windings for more 
than forty miles. My first glimpse of the falls was in 
the early morning, and the lovely, reeking splendour of 
the scene, as the great, placid river, all unconscious of 
its fate, rolls out of the mysterious depths of Africa, 
comes suddenly to the precipice's brink, and plunges 
in one mighty torrent into the obscurity of the cavern 
below, the rolling clouds of spray, the trembling earth, 
the sombre rain-forest on the opposite bank, and a rain- 
bow steahng over all, made a picture which will remain 
sharp and clear in my memory as long as I live. 

The Outer Lands are almost aU exploited; the work 
of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly finished, 
and in another decade or so we shall see their like no 

221 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

more. Rhodesia is the last of the great new countries 
open to colonisation under Anglo-Saxon ideals of 
govermnent and climatically suitable for the propaga- 
tion of the Anglo-Saxon race. Though the handful of 
hardy settlers who have already made it their home 
speak with the burr of the shires instead of the drawl 
of the plains; though they wear corded riding-breeches 
instead of leather "chaps"; and stuff Cavendish into 
their pipes instead of rolling their cigarettes from Bull 
Durham, they and the passing plainsmen of our own 
West are, when all is said and done, brothers under 
their skins. 

With the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo trunk 
line and its subsidiary systems to either coast, with the 
exploitation of the mineral deposits which constitute so 
much of Rhodesia's wealth, and with the harnessing of 
the great falls and the utilisation of the limitless power 
which will be obtainable from them, this virgin territory 
in the heart of Africa bids fair to be to the home and 
fortune seekers of to-morrow what the American West 
was to those of yesterday, and what northwestern 
Canada is to those of to-day. A few years more and it 
will be a developed and prosperous nation. To-day it 
is the last of the world's frontiers, where the hardy and 
adventurous of our race are still fighting the battles and 
solving the problems of civilisation. 



222 



CHAPTER X 
THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

THE most significant thing I saw in South Africa 
was an old-fashioned gabled, whitewashed house. 
The name of it is Groote Schuur, and it stands in very 
beautiful grounds on the slopes of Table Mountain, a 
mile or so at the back of Cape Town. That house was 
the home of Cecil John Rhodes, who, more than any 
other man, was responsible for the Boer War and for 
the resultant British predominance south of the Congo, 
and in his will he directed that it should be used as the 
official residence of the prime minister of that South 
African confederation which his prophetic mind fore- 
saw. The welding of the Boer republics of the Trans- 
vaal and the Orange Free State with the British col- 
onies of Natal and the Cape of Good Hope produced 
the great antipodal commonwealth of which the empire- 
builder dreamed, but the man who, as prime minister, 
dwells under Groote Schuur^s gabled roof and directs 
the pohcies of the new nation is a member of that Boer 
race which Rhodes hated and feared and whose pohti- 
cal power he firmly beheved had been broken forever. 
Fortune never doubled in her tracks more completely 
than when she made General Louis Botha, the last 
leader of Boer troops in the field, the first prime minister 
of a united South Africa. 

223 . 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

Strange things have happened in South Africa in 
the dozen years that have passed since the musketry 
crackled along the Modder and the Tugela, for the 
country that the world believed had been won for good 
and all by British arms is being slowly but surely rewon 
by Boer astuteness. Already the bonds which hold the 
new Union of South Africa to the British Empire have 
become very loose ones. The man who, as prime min- 
ister, is the virtual ruler of the young nation, is a far- 
sighted and sagacious Dutchman, while seven out of the 
eleven portfolios in his cabinet are held by men of the 
same race. The Union not only makes its own laws and 
fixes its own tariffs, but the leading Dutch organ of the 
country recently went so far as to urge that, in case 
Great Britain should become engaged in a European 
war, it would be possible and might be proper for South 
Africa to declare its neutrahty and take no part in it. 
Not only is the white population of the Union over- 
whelmingly Dutch, but in many parts of the country 
English is becoming merely a subsidiary tongue, while 
it is not at all unUkely, in view of the bill recently passed 
by the Parhament making Dutch compulsory in the 
schools, that the language of the Netherlands will 
eventually become the predominant tongue through- 
out all South Africa. Most suggestive of all, perhaps, 
the Orange River Colony, upon entering the Union, 
promptly reverted to its old name of the Orange Free 
State, which it bore before the war with England. 
Indeed, it may sadly perplex the historians of the future 
to decide who won the Boer War. 

224 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

If South Africa is to become a union in fact as well 
as in name its people will have to face and solve the 
great national problems of race and colour. Of these, 
the former are, if not the more important, certainly the 
more presssing. Two of the four provinces of the Union, 
remember, are British solely by right of conquest; a 
third is bound by the closest ties of blood and tradi- 
tion to the Dutch people; while only one of the four is 
British in sentiment and population. Many intelligent 
people with whom I talked, both in England and in 
Africa, assured me that the formation of the Union was 
the first step toward cutting the bonds which join South 
Africa to the mother country. While most Englishmen 
scoff at any such suggestion, swaggeringly asserting that 
they "have whipped the Dutch once and can do it 
again," the Dutch retort, on the other hand, that it took 
England, with all her financial and mihtary resources, 
four years, and cost her tens of thousands of lives and 
millions of pounds, to conquer the two little Boer re- 
pubhcs, and that she would not have beaten them 
then if their money had held out. Though there is 
certainly no love lost between the Enghsh and the 
Boers, I think that the majority of the latter are con- 
vinced that it is to their own best interests to be loyal 
to the new government, in the direction of which they 
have, after all, the greatest say. 

The attitude which the British Government has 
adopted in its treatment of the Boer population since 
the close of the war has been remarkable for its generos- 
ity and far-sightedness. In all its colonial history it has 

225 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

done few wiser things than the recognition of the mili- 
tary, as well as the civic, ability of General Botha. Not 
only is this sagacious Dutchman, who led the forces 
of the embattled Boers until dispersed by the tremen- 
dously superior might of England, and then inaugurated 
a guerilla warfare by which the conflict was prolonged for 
two years with victories which will go down in history 
as notable, now prime minister of the new nation, but, 
early in 191 2, he was appointed to the rank of general 
in that very army which he so long and so valorously 
defied. This is, I beheve, an almost unprecedented 
instance of the wise and politic exercise of imperial au- 
thority in the strengthening of imperial power and can 
hardly fail to result in increasing the loyalty of South 
Africa's Boer population. 

The men who planned and brought the Union into 
being have had to pick their steps with care, and more 
than once their ingenuity has been taxed to the utmost 
to avoid the outcropping of racial jealousies and en- 
mities. The white population of South Africa, you 
should understand, consists of three classes: the Boers, 
which means simply "tillers of the soil," and which is 
the name apphed by the South African Dutch to them- 
selves; the Colonials, or British immigrants, most of 
whom have come out with the intention of returning 
to England as soon as they have made their fortunes; 
and, lastly, the Africanders, men whose fathers were 
British immigrants, but who were themselves born and 
bred in South Africa and who have intermarried with 
the Boers so often that it is almost impossible to draw 

226 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

the line between the races. Given these three factions, 
therefore, with their different customs, ideals, and as- 
pirations, and it needs no saying that the task confront- 
ing those who are responsible for the smooth working 
of the governmental machinery is no easy one. The 
political jealousy existing between Briton and Boer in 
South Africa to-day is comparable only to that which 
existed between Northerners and Southerners dur- 
ing reconstruction days. The racial antagonism which 
arose over the location of the Federal capital, and which 
threatened at one time to upset the whole scheme of 
federation, was only overcome by the novel expedient 
of creating two capitals instead of one, Pretoria, the 
old capital of the Transvaal, where Kriiger held sway, 
being made the residence of the Governor- General and 
the seat of the executive power, while the Parliament 
sits in Cape Town. 

The Union Parliament consists of a Senate having 
forty members — eight of whom are appointed by the 
Governor-General, the other thirty-two being elected, 
eight by each province — and a House of Assembly with 
121 members chosen as follows: Cape of Good Hope 
51, Natal 17, Transvaal 36, and Orange Free State 17. 
No voter is disqualified by race or colour, but the mem- 
bers of Parliament must be English subjects of European 
descent who have lived in the colony for at least five 
years. Now, a very great deal, so far as the well-being 
of the native races of South Africa are concerned, de- 
pends upon the interpretation that is given to the 
words "European descent." In Cuban society every 

227 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

one who is not absolutely black is treated as white, 
whereas in the United States every one who is suspected 
of having even a "touch of the tar brush" is treated as 
black. Though the Federal constitution is very far 
from giving the native races a standing equal to that of 
the whites, intelhgent government of the natives is 
promised by a clause which provides that four of the 
Senate, out of a total of forty, shall be appointed be- 
cause of their special knowledge of the wants and wishes 
of the coloured population. 

If the racial problem is the most pressing, the 
colour problem is by far the most serious question be- 
fore the people of South Africa, for the blacks not only 
outnumber the whites four to one, but there is the ever- 
present danger that rebellion may spring up among them 
without the slightest warning. Apart from all other 
considerations, the very numbers of the natives in 
South Africa form a dangerous element in the problem, 
for there are close on five million blacks south of the 
Limpopo as against a million and a quarter Europeans, 
If, in our own South, where the blacks are only half as 
numerous as the whites, there exists a problem of which 
no satisfactory solution has been offered, how much 
more serious is the state of affairs in a country where a 
handful of white men — themselves split into two camps 
by racial and political animosities — are face to face with 
a vast, warlike, and constantly increasing native popu- 
lation! In fact, the colour problem which has arisen 
would be strikingly similar to that in our Southern 
States were it not that there is a vast difference in type 

228 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

and temperament between the South African native and 
the Southern darky. The native races are three in 
number: the Bushmen, the aborigines of South Africa, 
a race of pygmy savages of a very low order of inteUi- 
gence, who are fast becoming extinct; the Hottentots, 
a people considerably more advanced toward civihsa- 
tion but rapidly decreasmg from epidemics; and the 
Kaffirs, as the various sections of the great Zulu race 
are commonly known, a warhke, courageous, and hand- 
some people who, smce the British Government ended 
their inter-tribal wars, are rapidly multiplying, having 
increased fifteen per cent in the last seven years. Al- 
though the Europeans in South Africa universally regard 
the Kaffirs with contempt, it is not altogether unmixed 
with fear, for a nation of fighting men, such as the 
Zulus, who organised a great miHtary power, enacted a 
strict code of laws, and held the white man at bay for a 
quarter of a century, will not always remain in a state of 
subjection, nor will they tamely submit to being driven 
into the wilderness north of the Zambezi, a solution of 
the colour problem which has frequently been proposed. 
That the attitude of Great Britain toward the 
colour question in South Africa is similar to that of the 
Northern States toward the same problem in the South, 
while the attitude of the European settlers is almost 
identical with that of the Southerners, is strikingly 
illustrated by a case which recently occurred in South 
Africa, in which a European jury found a native guilty 
of attempting to assault a white woman, a crime as un- 
known under the old regime in South Africa as it was 

229 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

in our own South before the Civil War. Though the 
judge sentenced the man to death, the Governor- 
General promptly commuted the sentence on the ground 
that the "fact of crime" had not been established. Im- 
mediately a storm of protest and indignation arose 
among the white population which swept the country 
from the Zambezi to the Cape, the settlers asserting 
that if the decree of commutation were to form a prec- 
edent, no white woman would be safe in South Africa. 
The echoes of this controversy had not yet died away 
before two other cases occurred which intensely ag- 
gravated the situation. One was the case of a settler 
named Lewis, who shot a native for an insult to his 
daughters, while the other was that of the Honourable 
Galbraith Cole, a son of the Earl of Enniskillen, who 
killed a native on the alleged charge of theft. Both 
men were tried by white juries on charges of murder, 
and both were promptly acquitted, though Mr. Cole, 
in spite of his acquittal, was deported from South Africa 
by the government. As though to emphasise their 
colour prejudice, the lawyers of the Union about this 
time took concerted action to prevent native attorneys 
from practising among them. How, then, can the 
natives, who form three fourths of the population of the 
new Union, and who are far more children of the soil 
than the Europeans, be said to have protection of their 
most elementary rights if they are to be debarred from 
having men of their own colour and race to defend 
them, and if no white jury can be trusted to do justice 
where a native is concerned? 

230 




Photograph by the British South Africa Company. 

A social gathering in Mashonaland. 




I'hotoi^raph by the liritisli Soiilh Ajriid Com puny. 

Women's rights in Hethuan iland. 

\Vt)Mi:\ OF lil.ACK MAN'S Al-RU'A. 



" THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

The imperial government deserves the greatest 
credit, however, for the steps it has taken to preserve 
his lands to the native. In the native protectorates and 
reservations of Basutoland, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, 
Griqualand, Tembuland, and Pondoland the govern- 
ment has reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of 
the natives territories considerably larger than the com- 
bined area of our three Pacific-coast States. Though 
these territories are under the control of British resi- 
dent commissioners, the native chiefs are allowed to 
exercise jurisdiction according to tribal laws and cus- 
toms in all civil matters between natives, special courts 
having been estabhshed to deal with serious civil or 
criminal matters in which Europeans are concerned. 
Though certain small areas of land in these rich terri- 
tories are held by whites, the bulk of the country is re- 
served for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives, 
and it is not at all likely that any more land will be 
ahenated for purposes of settlement by Europeans. 
(Could anything be in more striking contrast to our 
disgraceful treatment of the Indian?) Though South 
Africa has much in common with Canada, and with 
Austraha, and with our own Southwest, it is, when all 
is said and done, a black man's coimtry ruled by the 
white man, and it is upon the justice, hberahty, and in- 
telligence of this rule that the peace and prosperity of 
the young nation must eventually depend. 

Two great obstacles will always stand in the way 
of the white man having an easy row to hoe in South 
Africa : the chmate and the lack of water. Though the 

231 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

climate of the uplands is pleasant and makes men want 
to lead an outdoor life, I am not at all certain that it 
tends to develop or maintain the keenness and energy 
characteristic of dwellers in the north temperate zone. 
The climate of the coastal regions is, moreover, dis- 
tinctly bad, the sharply cold nights and the misty, 
steaming days producing the coast fever, which is a 
combination of rheumatism, influenza, dysentery, and 
malaria, and is very debihtating indeed. The white 
man who intends to make his permanent home in South 
Africa has, therefore, two alternatives : he can submit to 
the exactions of the climate, take Hfe easily, leave the 
black bottle severely alone, and live a long but unpro- 
gressive Hfe, or he can exhaust his energies and under- 
mine his health in fighting the climate and die of old 
age at sixty. If the cHmate is not all that is desirable 
for men, it is infinitely worse for animals, for every dis- 
ease known to the veterinarian abounds. Time and 
again the herds of the country have been almost ex- 
terminated by the hoof-and-mouth disease, or by the 
rinderpest, a highly contagious cattle distemper which 
is probably identical with that "murrain" with which 
Moses smote the herds of ancient Egypt and which 
helped to bring Pharaoh to terms. In the low-lying 
regions along the East Coast, and in the country north 
of the Limpopo it is necessary to keep horses shut up 
every night until the poisonous mists and dew have dis- 
appeared before the sun lest they contract the "blue- 
tongue, " a disease characterised by a swollen, purplish- 
hued tongue which kills them in a few hours by choking; 

232 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

while in certain other districts, especially in the vicinity 
of the Zambezi and of the Portuguese territories, the 
deadly tsetse-fly makes it impossible to keep domestic 
animals at all. 

The other great obstacle to the prosperity of South 
Africa is the lack of water, for less than one-tenth of the 
country is suitable for raising any kind of a crop with- 
out water being led onto it— and irrigation by private 
enterprise is out of the question, as even the indomitable 
Rhodes was forced to admit. The government is fully 
ahve to the crying need for water, however, and a 
scheme for a national system of irrigation is filling a 
large part of the Ministry of Agriculture's programme. 
If carried out, this scheme will enormously enlarge the 
area of tillage, for some of the regions now hopelessly 
arid, such as the Karroo, have a soil of amazing fertiUty 
and need only water to make them produce luxuriant 
crops. Were the rains of the wet season conserved by 
means of the great tanks so common in India, or were 
artesian wells sunk like those which have transformed 
the desert regions of Algeria and Arizona, the vast 
stretch of the Karroo, instead of being yellow with 
sand, might be yellow with waving corn. 

Though agriculture is, and probably always will 
be, the least important of the country's great natural 
sources of wealth, the development of rural industries is, 
thanks to governmental assistance, steadily progressing. 
Roads and bridges are being built, experimental farms 
organised on a large scale, the services of scientific 
experts engaged, blooded live-stock imported, agricul- 

233 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

tural banks established, and literature dealing with 
agricultural problems is being distributed broadcast over 
the country. The exports of fruit are steadily increas- 
ing; sugar is being grown on the hot lands of Natal and 
might be grown all the way to the Zambezi; tea has 
lately been introduced in the coastal regions and would 
probably also flourish in the north; the tobacco of the 
Transvaal is as good a pipe tobacco as any grown, and 
those who have become accustomed to it will use no 
other; with the exception of the oUve, which does not 
thrive, and of the vine, which succeeds only in a limited 
area around Cape Town, nearly all of the products of 
the temperate zone and of subtropical regions can be 
grown successfully. Though South Africa unquestion- 
ably presents many promising openings in farming, in 
fruit-growing, and in truck gardening, it is folly for a 
man to attempt any one of them unless he possesses 
practical experience, a modest capital, and a willingness 
to work hard and put up with many inconveniences, 
for in no other English-speaking country are the neces- 
sities of life so dear and so poor in quality, nowhere is 
labour so unsatisfactory, and nowhere is lack of comfort 
so general. 

South Africa's chief source of wealth is, and always 
will be, its minerals. It was, strangely enough, the 
latest source to become known, for nobody suspected 
it until, in 1867, a Boer hunter, his eye caught by a 
sparkle among the pebbles on the Orange River, picked 
up the first diamond. The diamonds found in that 
region since then have amounted in value to nearly a 

234 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

billion dollars. Fifteen years after the great diamond 
finds which sent the adventurers and fortune-seekers 
of the world thronging to South Africa, came the still 
greater gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand, or 
"The Rand," as the reef of gold-bearing quartz in 
the Transvaal is commonly called. The total value 
of the gold production of the Rand for the twenty- 
five years ending in June, 1910, was nearly one and a 
half biUion dollars. But though the Rand produces 
more gold than America and Austraha put together; 
though Edmberley has a virtual monopoly of the 
world's supply of diamonds; though seams of silver, 
iron, coal, copper, and tin are only waiting for capital 
and skill to unlock their treasures, South Africa is, in 
the midst of this stupendous wealth, poor, for she is as 
dependent on foreign sources for her food supply as 
England. In other words, a region as large as all the 
States west of the Rocky Mountains, in which flourish 
nearly all the products of every zone from the Equator 
to the Pole, is unable to supply the wants of a white 
population which is less than that of Connecticut. In 
Cahfornia, on the other hand, which is strikingly simi- 
lar to South Africa in many respects, the cultivation of 
the land kept pace with the production of gold and 
eventually outstripped it. Until the mining industry 
of South Africa is Hkewise put upon a solid agricul- 
tural foundation, the country can never hope to be self- 
supporting. 

In many respects Johannesburg, the "golden city," 
is the most interesting place I have ever seen. In 1886 

235 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

it was nothing but a collection of miserable shanties. 
To-day " Joburg," as it is commonly called, is a city of 
a quarter of a million people, with asphalted streets, 
imposing office buildings, one of the best street-railway 
systems that I know, the finest hotel south of the Equa- 
tor, and one of the most beautiful country clubs in the 
world. It is a city of contrasts, however, for you can 
stand under the porte-cochere of the palatial Carlton 
Hotel and hear the click of roulette balls, the raucous 
scrape of fiddles, and the shouts of drunken miners issu- 
ing from a row of gambling-hells, dance-halls, and gin 
palaces still housed in one-story buildings of corrugated 
iron; a beplumed and bepainted Zulu will pull you 
in a 'rickshaw, over pavements as smooth and clean as 
those of Fifth Avenue, to a theatre where you will have 
the privilege of paying Metropolitan Opera House prices 
to witness much the same sort of a performance that 
you would find in a Bowery music-hall; in the Rand 
Club you can see bronzed and booted prospectors, fresh 
from the mining districts of Rhodesia or the Congo, 
leaning over the bar, cheek-by-jowl with sleek, immacu- 
lately groomed financiers from London and Berlin and 
New York. Johannesburg is a spendthrift city, a place 
of easy-come and easy-go, for the mine-workers are paid 
big wages, the mine-managers receive big salaries, and 
the mine-owners make big profits, and they all spend 
their money as readily as they make it. The English 
miner averages five dollars a day, which he spends 
between Saturday night and Monday morning in a 
drunken spree, while a native labourer will save enough 

236 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

in a few months to keep him in idleness and his concep- 
tion of comfort for the rest of his Hfe. 

There is pleasant society in Johannesburg and 
much hospitality to a stranger. I took nearly a score 
of letters of introduction with me to the Rand, but one 
would have done as well, for you present one letter, and 
at the dinner which the man to whom it is addressed 
promptly gives for you at the Rand Club or at the Carl- 
ton you will meet several of the other people to whom 
you bear introductions. Through their club life and 
their business relations the English and Americans in 
South Africa are linked together in acquaintance like 
rings in a shirt of chain-mail, so that if a man in Bula- 
wayo or Kimberley or Johannesburg gets to living be- 
yond his income, or loses heavily at cards, or pays undue 
attention to another man's wife, they will be discussing 
his affairs in the club bars or on the hotel verandas of 
Cape Town and Durban within a fortnight. I found 
that nearly all of the mines on the Rand are managed 
by Americans, and that the mine-owners, who are near- 
ly all English or German, preferred them to any other 
nationality, which struck me as being very compli- 
mentary to the administrative and mechanical abilities 
of our people. One of these American mine-managers 
drove forty miles in his motor-car so as to shake hands 
with me, merely because he had learned in a round- 
about way that I came from the same part of New York 
State as himself, while another fellow-countryman, who 
had made a great fortune during the Boer War by con- 
tracting to wash the clothes of the British army, and 

237 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

received war-time prices for his work, kidnapped me 
from the hotel where I was staying, and landed me, 
baggage and all, in his home, and actually felt affronted 
when I tried to leave after a week. 

Few places could be more unlike Johannesburg 
than Pretoria, the new capital of the Union, only thirty 
miles away. It is as different from the "golden city" as 
sleepy Bruges is from bustUng Antwerp; as Tarry town, 
New York, is from Paterson, New Jersey. At first 
sight I was surprised to find so English a town, but after 
I had strolled in the shade of the wooden arcades formed 
by the broad verandas of the shops I decided that the 
atmosphere of the city was Indian; the rows of mud- 
bespattered saddle-horses tied to hitching-posts along 
the main streets and the rural produce being sold from 
wagons in the central market-place recalled our own 
West; but the substantial, white-plastered houses, with 
their old-fashioned stoeps, their red-brick sidewalks, and 
their prim and formal gardens, finally convinced me that 
the town was, after all, Dutch. Every visitor to Pre- 
toria goes to see Kriiger's house, the low, whitewashed 
dwelling with the white lions on the stoep, where the 
stubborn old President used to sit, smoking his long pipe 
and drinking his black coffee and giving parental advice 
to his people. Across the way is the old Dutch church 
where he used to hold forth on Sundays, with the gold 
hands still missing from the clock-face on its steeple, for 
in the last days of the South African RepubHc they were 
melted down and went to swell the slender war-chest of 
the Boer army. In the cemetery hard by the crafty, 

238 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

indomitable old man lies buried, while the hated flag 
against which he fought so long flies over the capital 
where he collected his guns and hatched his schemes of 
conquest, and within sight of his black-marble tomb 
there are rising in brick and stone the great new build- 
ings which mark Pretoria as the capital of a united 
South Africa. 

Thirty miles northward across the veldt from Pre- 
toria is the great hole in the ground known as the Pre- 
mier Diamond Mine, the newest and potentially the 
richest of the South African diamond fields. Here, 
in January, 1905, the surface manager, a Scotchman 
named McHardy, while strolling through the pit during 
the noon hour, saw the sparkle of what he at first took 
to be a broken bottle. Prying it loose with his stick 
from the surrounding rubble, he found it to be a dia- 
mond as large as a good-sized orange. This remarkable 
stone, which is the largest diamond heretofore found, 
has since become known to the world as the Great CuUi- 
nan, being named after Sir Thomas CuUinan, one of the 
owners of the mine. It is a pure white stone, 4 by 23^ 
by 2 inches, weighing 3,025 carats, or 1.37 pounds, and 
worth in the neighbourhood of a million dollars. As 
the surface cleavage shows that it is undoubtedly a 
fragment of a much larger crystal, one cannot but won- 
der what the original stone was like. The Great Cul- 
linan was immediately purchased by the Transvaal 
Government — or, rather, the mine's share was pur- 
chased, for the government receives sixty per cent of 
the value of all diamonds found — and presented to King 
Edward. The question then arose of how so valuable 

239 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

a gem could be transported to England in safety, for 
no sooner had its discovery been announced than the 
criminals of the world began to lay their plans to get 
possession of it. After many discussions and innumer- 
able suggestions and much newspaper comment, four 
men, armed to the teeth, left the Premier Mine, carry- 
ing with them a red-leather despatch box. Crossing 
the thirty miles of veldt to Pretoria under heavy escort, 
they were conveyed in a private car to Cape Town; in 
the liner by which they took passage to England a safe 
had been specially installed and the red-leather de- 
spatch box was placed in it, two of the men remaining on 
duty in front of it night and day. From Southampton a 
special train took them up to London and a strong guard 
of detectives and police surrounded them on their way 
to the bank at which the diamond was to be delivered. 
When the despatch box was opened in the presence of a 
group of curious officials it was found to contain nothing 
more valuable than a lump of coal ! The stone itself — 
and as Sir Thomas CuUinan told me the story it is un- 
doubtedly true — was wrapped in cotton wool and tissue 
paper, put in a pasteboard box, wrapped up in brown 
paper, and sent to England by parcels post, not even 
the post-office authorities being given an inlding that it 
was in the mails. I almost forgot to mention, by the 
way, that McHardy, the discoverer of the great stone, 
was given a bonus of ten thousand dollars, though it is 
a sad and peculiar commentary that within a year his 
wife died, the bank in which -he put the money failed, 
and his house burned down. 

The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which 

240 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

there are two layers: a soft, yellow clay, lying on or near 
the surface, and a hard, blue clay, l3dng deeper. These 
clays, which are usually covered by a thin stratum of 
calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud 
pits due to volcanic action, such as the boiling springs 
of the Yellowstone. Imagine a great hollow, looking 
like a gigantic bowl, perhaps half a mile in diameter and 
one hundred feet deep, enclosed by a series of barbed- 
wire fences and filled by thousands of Kafiir workmen, 
looking, from a distance, like a gigantic swarm of 
ants — such was my first impression of the Premier 
Mine. The native labourers, who work in three shifts 
of eight hours each, after cleaving the "hard-blue" 
with their picks, load it onto trolley-cars, which are 
attached to a cable and hauled to the surface of the pit, 
where it is spread on mile-long fields and exposed for 
several months to rain, wind, and sun so as to effect de- 
composition. The softened lumps of earth, after being 
brought into stiU smaller fragments by the pickaxe, are 
then sent to the mills, where they are crushed, pulver- 
ised, washed, and finally sent to the "greaser" to get at 
the stones. Until very recently men had to be em- 
ployed to sort the washed "concentrates" and pick out 
the diamonds. But they would miss some. And the 
men had to be guarded lest they steal the gems. And 
detectives had to be hired to watch the guards who 
watched the men. But one day a mine employee named 
Kirsten happened to notice that the diamonds, no mat- 
ter how small or discoloured, always stuck to a greasy 
surface, just as iron filings stick to a magnet, while the 

241 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

dirt and other stones did not. That was the suggestion 
which led to the invention of the "Kirsten greaser," a 
series of sloping boards, heavily coated with grease, 
which are gently agitated as the mud and sKme contain- 
ing the diamonds are slowly washed over them, and 
which never fail to collect the precious stones. 

At Kimberley, which is the only other diamond- 
producing district of any importance in South Africa, 
the gem-bearing ground extends over an area of but 
thirty-three acres, so that open mining has long since 
given way to shafts, which have now been sunk to a 
depth of two thousand five hundred feet, galleries be- 
ing driven through the producing ground at every forty- 
foot level, precisely as in a coal mine. Kimberley has 
a romantic and picturesque history. In 1869 you could 
not have found its name upon the map. In the follow- 
ing year a Boer hunter, pitching his tent on the banks 
of the Orange River, chanced to pick up a gUttering 
stone from among the pebbles. The news of his find 
making its way overland to Cape Town, the submarine 
cables flashed it to every quarter of the globe, so that 
within a twelvemonth adventurers and fortime-seekers 
had flocked there in tens of thousands. By 187 1 sixteen 
hundred claims, each thirty-one feet square, were be- 
ing worked, each man digging out the earth on his own 
small plot, carrying it to one side, pulverising it by 
hand, and sifting it for diamonds. The dirt from one 
claim would fall into a neighbouring one, while some 
miners could not get their dirt out at all without crossing 
another's property, so that quarrels and lawsuits and 

242 




The Premier Diamond Mine, Transvaal. "Imagine a great hollow filled by thousands of KaflSr work- 
men, who look, from a distance, like a gigantic swarm of ants." 




^ape Town from the sea, showing TalMe Mountain and Table Bay. 
IN THE COUNTRY OF lilC. THINGS. 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

shooting affrays soon began. About this time two quiet, 
uncommunicative, shabbily clad men appeared at Kim- 
berley and began to buy up the various claims, until, 
before any one really appreciated what was happen- 
ing, the whole diamond industry of South Africa was in 
their hands. Those men were Cecil John Rhodes and 
Barney Barnato, and the great amalgamation which 
their skill and shrewdness effected, now known as the 
DeBeers ConsoHdated Mining Company, was one of 
the greatest coups in the history of finance. It is this 
corporation which the women of the world have to 
blame for keeping up the price of diamonds, for the first 
thing it did was to close the greater part of the Kim- 
berley mines, keeping just enough open to produce the 
amount of stones which experience has proved that 
Europe and America are able to take at a price high 
enough to leave a gratifying profit. Although, as a 
result of this policy, the price of diamonds has been 
well maintained, the population of Kimberley has been 
greatly reduced, the one great corporation, with its 
comparatively small staff of employees and its labour- 
saving machinery, having taken the place of the horde 
of independent adventurers of the early days. 

It struck me that by far the most interesting sights, 
both at the Kimberley and the Premier mines, were the 
so-called compounds, in which the native labourers are 
confined, for the native who hires out to work in a dia- 
mond mine must submit, during the term of his con- 
tract, to as close confinement as a convict in a peniten- 
tiary; he knows that he is in danger of being shot by the 

243 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

guards if he attempts to escape; he is prepared to be 
searched daily with the same minuteness which customs 
inspectors display in the case of a known smuggler; and 
when his contract expires he has still to put up with a 
fortnight's solitary confinement, in which emetics and 
cathartics play an unpleasant part. The mine com- 
pounds are huge enclosures, unroofed but covered with 
a wire netting to prevent anything being thrown out 
over the walls. Around the interior of the wall are rows 
of corrugated-iron huts, in which the natives live and 
sleep when they are not at work, while the open space 
in the middle is used for cooking, for washing, and for 
native games. The compounds are surrounded by three 
lines of barbed- wire fence which are constantly patrolled 
by armed sentries and illuminated at night by power- 
ful search-lights; every entrance is as jealously guarded 
as that of a German fortress; and visitors are never ad- 
mitted unless they bear a pass signed by the administra- 
tion and are accompanied by a responsible official of the 
mine. Although the government — which, as I have 
already remarked, takes sixty per cent of the mine's 
earnings — has made I. D. B. (iUicit diamond-buying) 
a penal offence with a uniform punishment of twenty 
years at hard labour, and though the mining companies 
maintain espionage systems which rival those of many 
Continental governments, no employee, from director 
down to day labourer, ever being free from scrutiny, 
millions of dollars' worth of diamonds are smuggled out 
of the mines each year. To encourage honesty, ten 
per cent of the value of any stone which a workman 

244 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

may find is given to him if he brings it himself to the 
overseer, well over a quarter of a million dollars being 
paid out annually on stones thus found. 

The compound of the Premier Mine contained, at 
the time of my visit, something over twelve thousand 
natives, representing nearly every tribe from Pondo- 
land to the head-waters of the Congo. Here one sees 
Zulus, Fingos, Pondos, Basutos, Bechuanas, Matabele, 
Mashonas, Makalaka, and even Bushmen from the 
Kalahari country and Masai from German East Africa, 
all attracted by the high wages, which range from five 
to eight dollars a week. When the native's six-month 
contract has ended, he takes his wages in British sover- 
eigns — and his earnings accumulate quickly because he 
can five on very little — goes home to his own tribe, per- 
haps six weeks' journey away, buys a wife and a yoke of 
oxen, and hves lazily ever after. Not all of the natives 
are of so tlirifty a turn of mind, however, for the com- 
pany store holds many attractions for them and they 
are heavy purchasers of camel's-hair blankets, French 
perfumes, and imported cutlery, refusing almost inva- 
riably to take anything but the best. 

I have tried to paint for you a comprehensive, 
though necessarily an impressionistic, picture of this 
great new nation that has sprung up so quickly in the 
antipodes, and to give you at least a rough idea of 
what its people, its soil, its towns, its chmate, its re- 
sources, and its problems are like. That South Africa 
will always be a country of great mineral wealth there 
is little doubt, for, when the suppHes of gold and 

245 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

diamonds are exhausted, copper, iron, and coal should 
still furnish good returns. Likewise, it will always be 
a great ranching country, for nearly all of its vast 
veldt is ideal, both in climate and pasturage, for live- 
stock. It will probably never become a manufactur- 
ing country, for coal is of poor quality, there is neither 
water power nor inland waterways, and labour is neither 
good nor cheap. If, as I have already remarked, gov- 
ernment irrigation can be introduced as successfully as 
it has been in our own Southwest, and if the malaria 
which makes the rich coast-lands almost uninhabitable 
can be exterminated as effectually as we have exter- 
minated it on the Isthmus of Panama, I can see no rea- 
son why South Africa should not eventually become 
one of the great agricultural countries of the world. 
Though many South Africans look forward to a day 
when the natives will begin to retire to the country 
north of the Zambezi, and when a large European popu- 
lation will till their own farms, by their own labour, with 
the aid of government-assisted irrigation, I am person- 
ally of the opinion that South Africa will never become 
at all evenly populated, but that it will always bear a 
marked resemblance to our Southwest, with large areas 
devoted to the raising of sheep and cattle, with certain 
other areas irrigated for the raising of fruit, and with its 
population centred for the most part in towns scattered 
at long distances from one another, but connected by 
rapid railway communications. 

Everything considered, South Africa is a country of 
big things — big pay, big prices, big opportunities, big 

246 



THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS 

obstacles, big resources, big rewards — and she needs 
young men to help her fight her battles and solve her 
problems. So, if I were a youngster, with the sheep- 
skin of a technical or agricultural school in my pocket, 
a few hundred dollars in my purse, and a longing for 
fortune and adventure in my heart, I think that I 
should walk into one of those steam-ship offices in 
Bowling Green and book a passage for that land of 
which some one has said, "Fortune knocks at a man's 
door once in most countries, but in South Africa she 
knocks twice." 



247 



CHAPTER XI 
THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

THERE can be no doubt about it: real cannibal 
kings are getting scarce. Ever since, as a young- 
ster, I read of Du Chaillu's adventures among the man- 
eating natives of Equatoria, I had hankered to see a real 
live cannibal in the flesh. But when, in later years, I 
made inquiries about them from missionaries and tra- 
ders and officials in Senegal and Uganda and Nyasa- 
land, I invariably received the reply: "Oh, that's all 
over now; except among a few of the West Coast tribes, 
cannibalism is a thing of the past." So when the cap- 
tain of the little German cargo boat on which I was 
loitering up and down Africa's Indian seaboard re- 
marked at breakfast one morning that he had decided 
to put in to Mahe, in the Seychelle group, and that I 
might care to pass the time while he was taking on cargo 
by visiting the colony of cannibal royalties who were in 
exile there, I felt that one of my boyhood dreams was to 
be realised at last. 

Do you happen, by any chance, to have been to 
Mahe, in the Seychelles? No? Of course not. Then 
you must picture an emerald island dropped down in 
a turquoise sea. Peacock-coloured waves ripple on a 
silver strand, and this loses itself almost immediately 
in a dense forest of giant palms, which, mounting lei- 

248 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

surely, dwindles and straggles and runs out in a peak of 
bare blue rock, which disappears, in turn, behind a great, 
low-hanging, purple heat cloud. To reach these delect- 
able isles one must have time and patience a-plenty, for 
they lie far from the ocean highways and are visited by 
scarcely a dozen vessels, all told, each year. Draw a 
line straight across the Indian Ocean from Colombo to 
Zanzibar, and where that hne intersects the equator 
are the Seychelles, mere specks in that expanse of 
ocean. Mahe, the largest of the group, is everything 
that a tropical island should be, according to the story- 
books, even to its inaccessibihty, for, barring the French 
mail steamer which touches there every other month 
on its way to Madagascar, and an occasional German 
freighter or British tramp which drops in on its way 
from Goa to Kilindini, on the chance of picking up a 
cargo of copra, it is as completely cut off from the out- 
side world as though it were in Mars. 

I rather imagine that they are the loneliest peo- 
ple in the world, those score of men and women — 
English, French, and German — who constitute the 
entire white population of the islands. That is why 
they are so pathetically eager to welcome the rare visi- 
tors who come their way. Indeed, until I went to Mahe 
I never knew what hospitality really meant. When our 
anchor rumbled down under the shadow of the Morne 
Seychellois, and the police boat — its crew of negroes, 
with their flashing teeth and big, good-humoured faces, 
their trim, blue sailor suits and broad-brimmed straw 
wide-awakes, looking like overgrown children — had 

249 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

taken me ashore, I promptly found myself surrounded 
by the entire European population. 

"I am the wife of the legal adviser to the Crown," 
said a sweet-faced little Irishwoman. "My husband 
and I would be so pleased if you would come up to our 
bungalow for dinner. You can have no idea how good 
it seems to see a white face again. " 

"Oh, I say, then you must promise to breakfast 
with me," urged a tall young Englishman in immacu- 
late white Hnen, who, it proved, was the superior judge 
of the colony. "You won't disappoint me, will you, 
old chap? I'm dying to hear what's going on in the 
world. And if you should have any magazines or news- 
papers that you could spare " 

But the government chaplain, wasting no time in 
words, fairly hustled me into a diminutive dog-cart and, 
amid the reproaches of his fellow-exiles, off we rattled 
behind the only horse on the island. The padre was 
not to monopohse me for long, however, for the little 
group of homesick exiles pursued us to his bungalow, 
where they settled me in a long cane chair, thrust 
upon me cheroots and whiskey-and-sodas, and listened 
breathlessly to the bits of world gossip for which I 
ransacked the pigeon-holes of my memory for their 
benefit. The newest songs, the most recent plays, the 
latest fashions, all the gossip of Broadway and Oxford 
Street and the Avenue de I'Opera — they hung on my 
words with an eagerness that was pathetic. 

"I hope you'll pardon us," apologised my host, 
"but it's so seldom that we see a pukka white man out 

250 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

here that we quite forget the few manners we have left 
in our eagerness to learn what is going on at home — the 
little things, you know, that are not important enough 
to put in the cables and that they never think to put in 
the letters. Until you have hved in such a place as this, 
my friend, you don't know the meaning of that word 
'home.'" 

It is hot in the Seychelles; hot with a damp, sticky, 
humid, enervating heat which is unknown away from 
the Line. They tell a story in Mahe of an Enghsh resi- 
dent who died from fever and went to the lower regions. 
A few days later his friends received a message from the 
departed. It said, "Please send down my blankets." 
There are days in an American midsummer when in- 
doors becomes oppressive; it is always oppressive in the 
Seychelles, in January as in August, at midnight as at 
noon. During the "hot season" it is overpoweringly 
so, for you Hve for six months at a stretch in a bath of 
perspiration and wonder whether you will ever know 
what it is to be cool again. " There are six hundred min- 
utes in every hour of the hot weather," the governor's 
wife remarked to me, "and not one of them bearable. 
Although," she added, "after the mercury in your bed- 
room thermometer has climbed above one hundred and 
thirty, a few more degrees don't much matter." In 
her bungalow, for the greater part of the day, the 
white woman in the Seychelles is as much a prisoner by 
reason of the heat as is a Turkish woman in a harem 
from custom. Having neither shopping, domestic duties, 
nor callers to occupy her, the only break in the day's 

251 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

terrible monotony comes at sunset, when every one 
meets every one else at the little club on the water-front 
which, with its breeze-swept verandas and its green cro- 
quet lawns and tennis courts, is the universal gathering- 
place between the hours of six and eight. An afternoon 
nap is universal — if the flies will allow it. Flies by day 
and mosquitos by night are as wearing on European 
nerves as the cUmate, the beds being from necessity so 
smothered in mosquito netting that the air that gets 
within is as unsatisfactory as strained milk. In the hot 
weather a punkah is kept going all night — this huge, 
swinging fan, pulled by a coolie who squats in the ve- 
randa outside, and who can go to sleep without ceasing 
his pulling, being as necessary for comfort as a pillow — 
while, during the hottest nights, it is customary to sleep 
unclad and uncovered, save for a sheet, which the 
punkah-coolie, slipping in every hour, sprinkles with 
water. 

The white woman in this part of the world is an 
early riser. A cup of tea is always served her when she 
is awakened, and as soon as she is dressed comes chota 
hazri, or the little breakfast, consisting of tea, toast, 
eggs, and fruit. The most is made of the cool hours of 
the morning, for in the hot weather it is customary to 
"shut up the bungalow" at about seven a. m., when 
the temperature is moderately low compared with 
what it will rise to a few hours later. Every door and 
window is closed and thereafter the greatest care is 
taken to make entrances and exits as quickly as pos- 
sible, for a door left open for any length of time quickly 

252 




rilK TRAVELLKk S TKKK ( )|- IIIK Sl;^ ( lll-.l.l.KS. 

By sticking a knife into the- busc of this hospitable tree a stream of pure, cool water can be obtained 
by the thirsty traveller. 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

raises the temperature. If kept carefully closed, how- 
ever, it is remarkable how cool the room keeps as com- 
pared with the stifling heat without. 

Though a SeycheUian bungalow is generally barn- 
like without and barren within, its European mistress 
usually contrives to make its rooms pretty and invit- 
ing, it being astonishing what marvels of transformation 
can be accompHshed by means of native mattings, In- 
dian printed curtains, and furniture of Chinese wicker, 
all effective and ridiculously cheap. The kitchen is a de- 
tached building, erected as far away from the bungalow 
as possible, and the white woman who knows when she 
is well off seldom enters it. Once a month, however, 
she inspects her cooking pots and pans, because, be- 
ing made of copper, they have to be periodically tinned 
or they become poisonous, almost as many lives being 
lost in the tropics by the neglect of this simple precau- 
tion as by failure to have every drop of drinking water 
boiled. As there is no ice-making plant in the Sey- 
chelles, water is cooled for drinking by being placed in 
a porous earthenware vessel and swung to and fro in 
the heated atmosphere until, though still far from cool, 
it is a httle less tepid and nauseous. 

But the European residents are not the only exiles 
in the Seychelles, nor, to my way of thinking, the ones 
most to be pitied, for of recent years these islands, pre- 
sumably because of their very remoteness, have been 
turned into a political prison for those deposed cannibal 
kings whose kingdoms have, on one excuse and another, 
been added to the dominions of the British Crown. 

253 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

At present there are three poHtical prisoners of note on 
the island of Mahe — King Kabanga of Uganda, King 
Assibi of the Gold Coast, and King Prempeh of Ashan- 
tee. Though all of these ebony royalties were enthu- 
siastic patrons of the cooking-pot. King Prempeh is by 
far the most notorious and the most interesting person- 
aHty of the three, for it was his palace at Kumasi that 
was built of the skulls and surrounded by a neat picket 
fence made from the leg and arm bones of the people he 
and his tribesmen had eaten. Hard by the palace was 
the ghastly "crucifixion grove" where the victims were 
slaughtered and their bodies hung until sufficiently 
gamy to suit the royal palate. Owing to an error of 
judgment in selecting a British commissioner as the 
piece de resistance for one of his feasts, an expedition was 
sent to Ashantee, the country annexed to the British 
empire, and its ruler forced to exchange his skull- walled 
palace in Kumasi for a four-roomed, tin-roofed cottage 
in the outskirts of Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, 
where, surrounded by the huts of the chieftains who ac- 
companied him into exile, he hves on the meagre pension 
granted him by the British Government. 

Clad in the flaming cotton robe of red and yellow 
which is the West African equivalent of royal ermine, 
worn over a pair of very soiled pajamas, his Majesty 
received me on the veranda of his little dwelling in the 
presence of the constable who guards him and who acts 
as interpreter when the King's scanty store of English 
gives out. Now I am not an entire stranger to the ways 
of the Lord's Anointed, but this audience with Prempeh 

254 




The Seychelles. "Emerald islands dropped down in a turquoise sea." 




The mail It-adinu from \'icloria, Islaml of Mahe. to the residence of King Prcmpuh 
ISLANDS OF EXILE. 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

of Ashantee was one of the most memorable experiences 
that I can recall. In the first place, the mercury had 
crept up and up and up until it hovered in the neigh- 
bourhood of one hundred and thirty degrees in the shade 
of the house; in the second place, the sons of the King 
(he told me that he had forty-two in all) had crowded 
into the tiny room until the place fairly reeked with the 
smell of perspiration; in the third place, I was at a loss 
what to talk to his Majesty about. The questions 
which one would like to ask a cannibal king are obvious 
— ^whether he takes his meat rare or well done, whether 
he prefers the tenderloin or the sirloin, whether he likes 
white meat better than black — but Prempeh of Ashan- 
tee is not at all the sort of person with whom one would 
feel inclined to take liberties, and I was very far from 
being sure whether he would consider such questions as 
liberties or not. After an awkward pause, during which 
the King shuffled his feet uneasily and I wiped away 
rivulets of perspiration, he said something in Ashantee 
— at least I suppose it was Ashantee — to one of his at- 
tendants, who shortly returned with a tin tray holding 
a bottle of whiskey, a siphon of lukewarm seltzer, and 
a couple of very dirty glasses. After another long and 
uncomfortable pause, the Eling asked me if I wouldn't 
have something to drink. Taking it for granted that 
Prempeh's capacity for drink would be as outre as his 
choice of food, I poured his beer glass full to the brim 
with whiskey, giving to myself the drink sanctioned by 
civilised custom. 

"In my country," said the King, leaning forward 
255 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

and speaking in the broken English which he had ac- 
quired from the government chaplain, "bad men some- 
times try to poison king, so king turn drinks other way 
round," and, suiting the action to the words, he turned 
the tray so as to place before me the beer-glassful of 
whiskey. I have never been quite certain whether there 
was a twinkle in the eye of that simple-hearted cannibal 
when he literally turned the table on me or not. 

At the time of my visit to Prempeh he was in the 
throes of marital unhappiness, the details of which he 
confided to me. It seems that for several years past he 
had been endeavouring to gain admission to the Church- 
of -England fold, arguing, plausibly enough, that such a 
proof of his complete regeneration might result in induc- 
ing the British Government to send him back to his 
home in Ashantee. Working on that assumption, he 
had, not long before, asked the government chaplain to 
confirm him, to which request that gratified but still 
somewhat sceptical clergyman had rephed: "I am sorry 
to say that what your Majesty asks is at present im- 
possible, as your Majesty's marital affairs are not pleas- 
ing to the church." 

So Prempeh, who had brought only twelve of his 
wives with him into exile, thinking that the church held 
such a number to be incompatible with his dignity, — for 
the workings of the West African mind are pecuhar, re- 
member, — sent a message to the governor of the Sey- 
chelles asking permission to take a maiden of Mahe for 
his thirteenth spouse", and it was not until the indignant 
chaplain remonstrated with him for his fall from grace 

256 




■^ a 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

that he grasped the fact that Christianity demands 
of its converts the minimum instead of the maximum 
number of wives. 

"So me ship three wives back Africa," Prempeh 
explained to me in his quaint West Coast Enghsh. 
"Now me have only nine. Nine wives not many for 
great king. But if chappy [chaplain] not let me in 
church with nine wives, then me ship them back Africa 
too, for me very much homesick to see Ashantee." 

Poor, deposed, exiled, homesick king, he will never 
again see that African home for which he longs, I fear, 
for he cost England far too much in lives and money. 
He came out on the veranda of his little house to say 
good-by, and as I looked back, as my 'rickshaw boy 
drew me swiftly down the road, he was still standing 
there waving to me — a real, dyed-in-the-wool cannibal 
king, who has killed and eaten more human beings, I 
suppose, than almost any man that ever Hved. 

Two days' steam southward from the Seychelles, 
and midway between the island of Mahe and Diego- 
Suarez, on the north coast of Madagascar, Hes the islet 
of Saint Pierre, whence comes much of the guano with 
which we fertihse our flower-beds and gardens, and those 
giant sea-turtles whose shells supply our women-folk 
with fans, combs, and brooches. Here, on this half 
a square mile of sun-baked rock in the middle of the 
Indian Ocean, the Scotch manager of the syndicate 
which works the guano deposits lives the whole year 
round, during half of which time he sees no human face, 

257 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

during the other half having the company of a few 
score blacks who are brought over from Mahe under 
contract to gather the rich deposits of guano. His only- 
shelter a wooden shack, his only companions the clouds 
of clamorous sea-fowl, his only fresh food turtles and 
fish, his only communication with the world two times 
a year when the workers come and go, I expected to find 
him unshaven and slovenly, the most exiled of all exiles, 
the loneliest of the lonely. I made up a bundle of two- 
months-old newspapers and pictured the pleasure it 
would give him to learn the news of that big, busy, 
teeming world which lay over there beyond the rim of 
the Indian Ocean. I imagined that he would cling to 
my arm and beg piteously for news from home, and I 
thought it quite possible that he might weep on my 
shoulder. But when a crew of blacks had taken me 
through the booming surf in a tiny native dugout, and I 
and my bundle of newspapers had been hauled up an 
overhanging cUff at the end of a rope, I found the poor 
exile whose lonely lot I had come to cheer immaculate 
in white linen and pipe-clayed shoes and wholly con- 
tented with the shade of a green palm, the murmur of 
a turquoise sea, a book of Robert Burns 's verses, and 
the contents of a large black bottle. 

When De Lesseps, that lean Frenchman with the 
vision of a prophet and the energy of a Parisian, drove 
his spade through the sands of Suez and thereby short- 
ened the sea-road from Europe to the East by five thou- 
sand miles, he gave France her revenge on Saint Helena. 

258 




y -c 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

Ever since Clive won England her Indian empire, this 
obscure rock in the South Atlantic had been a prosper- 
ous half-way house on the road to the Farther East, its 
lonely islanders driving a roaring trade with the winged 
fleets of war and commerce that stopped there long 
enough to replenish their larders and refill their casks. 
But when the completion of the Canal altered the trade 
routes of the world, the tedious Cape journey was aban- 
doned, the South Atlantic was deserted, and Saint 
Helena was ruined. By the genius of one of her sons, 
France had settled her score with that grim island, 
whose name still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of 
Frenchmen. 

He who would see the prison place of the great 
Emperor for himself must be rich in time and patience, 
for the vessels that earn their government subsidy by 
grudgingly dropping anchor for a few hours in James- 
town's open roadstead are only indifferently good and 
very far between. Scarcely larger than the island of 
Nantucket — or Staten Island, if that conveys more 
meaning; almost midway between the fever-haunted 
coasts of Angola and Brazil; sixteen days' steam from 
Southampton Water and seven from Table Bay; its 
rockbound coasts as precipitous and forbidding as the 
walls of the Grand Canyon; and with a population less 
than that of many of New York's down-town office 
buildings, Saint Helena possesses one attraction, never- 
theless, which more than repaid me for the long and 
arduous journey. That attraction is a mean and lonely 
cottage, set on a bleak and barren hill. To stand within 

259 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

the walls of that wretched dwelling and to stare out 
across the wastes of ocean from that wind-swept hill- 
top, I travelled twenty thousand miles, for on that 
distant stage was played the last act of the mightiest 
tragedy of modern times. 

Loitering up and down the seven seas, I have seen 
many islands, but none, that I can recall, that turns 
toward the seafarer a face at once so gloomy and so for- 
bidding. It needs no vivid imagination, no knowledge 
of its history, to transform the perpendicular cliffs of 
Saint Helena into the grim walls of a sea-surrounded 
prison. It is a place so stern, so solemn, and so awesome 
that it makes you shiver in spite of yourself. As I 
leaned over the rail of a Castle steamer, with sunrise 
still an hour away and the Cross flaming overhead, and 
watched the island's threatening profile loom up out of 
the night, I shuddered in sympathy with that stern, 
cold man who came as a prisoner to these same shores 
close on a century ago. 

From the view-points of safety and severity, the 
captors of the fallen Emperor could not have chosen 
better. For the safe-keeping of a man whose ambitions 
had decimated, bankrupted, and exhausted the people 
of a continent, it was imperative that a prison should be 
found whence escape or rescue would be out of the ques- 
tion by reason of its very isolation and remoteness. 
Twelve hundred miles from the nearest continental 
land, and that a savage and fever-infested wilderness; 
with but a single harbour, and that so poor that landing 
there is perilous except in the very best of weather; its 

260 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

great natural strength increased by impregnable forts; 
its towering rocks commanding a sea view of sixty miles 
in every direction, thus obviating the possibility of a 
surprise attack, Saint Helena admirably fulfilled the 
requirements for a prison demanded by a harassed, 
weakened, and frightened Europe. 

Though those travellers who take passage by the 
slow and infrequent "intermediate" steamers to the 
Cape are usually afforded an opportunity of setting foot 
on Saint Helena's soil, the brief stay which is made there 
permits of their doing httle else. As the house occupied 
by Napoleon stands in the very heart of the island and 
on its highest point, and as the road which leads to it is 
so rough and precipitous that those who hire one of the 
few available vehicles generally walk most of the way 
out of pity for the horses, there is rarely time for the 
traveller who intends proceeding by the same boat to 
set eyes on the spot which gives the island its fame. 
I heard, indeed, of scores of travellers who had chosen 
the discomforts of this roundabout and tedious route 
for the express purpose of visiting the house where 
Napoleon died, and who found, on arriving at Saint 
Helena, that they would have time for nothing more 
than a hurried promenade in the town. Nor are any 
efforts made by the indolent islanders to induce travel- 
lers to stay over a steamer, for there are neither hotels 
nor boarding-houses, and a visitor would have to depend 
for his bed and board on the hospitaHty of some private 
family. 

The South Atlantic, her bosom rising and falling 
261 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

lazily under the languorous influence of the tropic morn- 
ing, had exchanged her sombre night robe for a shimmer- 
ing, sparkHng garment of sun-flecked blue before the 
sleepy-eyed quarantine officer had laboriously climbed 
the port ladder; and the yellow flag at our masthead, 
fluttering down, had signalled to the clamorous crews 
of negroes waiting eagerly alongside that they could take 
us ashore. In the pitiless Hght of the early morning 
the island looked even more forbidding than when the 
harshness of its features was veiled by night. Naked 
slope and ridge rose everjrwhere, and everywhere they 
were cut and cross-cut by equally bare vaUeys and 
ravines, but not a house, not a tree, not a sign of life, 
vegetable or animal, could we detect as we drew near. 
Even the sea-birds seemed afraid to ahght on those grim 
cliffs, darting in on outspread wings as though to settle 
on them, only to wheel away with frightened, discordant 
cries, the while an everlasting surf hurled itself angrily 
against the smooth black rocks, voicing its impotence 
in a sullen, booming roar. 

Approaching the shore, we were amazed to see that 
what had appeared from the ship's deck to be a solid, 
perpendicular wall of rock was spHt in the middle, as 
though by a mighty chisel, and in the cleft thus formed 
nestled Jamestown, the island's capital, flanked on 
either side by towering, fort-crowned cHffs which effec- 
tually conceal it from the sea. Landing at the same 
stone water-stairs where the captive Emperor had come 
ashore nearly a century before, we followed a stone- 
paved causeway, bordered on the land side by a deep 

262 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

but empty moat, over a creaking drawbridge, through 
an ancient portcuUised gateway, and so into a spacious 
square, shaded by many patriarchal trees and dotted 
here and there with groups of antiquated cannon. Bor- 
dering the square are the post-office, which does a thriv- 
ing business in the sale of the rare surcharged stamps of 
the islands when the steamers come in; the custom- 
house, the law courts, the yellow church of Saint James, 
and the castle, a picturesque and straggling structure, 
begun by the first English governor in 1659, which is 
used by the governor for his "town" residence, though 
his "country" place is barely a mile away. The town 
itseK is simply a mean and straggling street, lined on 
either side by whitewashed, red-roofed, green-shuttered 
houses which become less and less pretentious and more 
and more scattered as you make your way up the ever 
narrowing valley until it loses itself in the hills. If 
there is a more dead-and-alive place than Jamestown 
I have yet to see it. A New Hampshire hamlet on a 
Sunday morning is positively boisterous in comparison. 
Once a month, however, when the British mail comes in, 
the town arouses itself long enough to go down to the 
post-office and get the letters and the papers — espe- 
cially the illustrated weeklies — from that far-off place 
which every islander, even though he was born and 
raised on Saint Helena, refers to as "home." 

From the very edge of the village square the cliff 
known as Ladder Hill rises sheer, its great bulk throw- 
ing an ominous shadow over the little town. It takes 
its name from the Jacob's ladder whose seven hundred 

263 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

wooden steps will bring you, panting and perspiring, 
to the fort and the wireless station which occupy the 
top. I suppose there is no other such ladder in the 
world, it being, so I was proudly assured by the 
islanders, nine hundred and ninety-three feet long and 
six hundred and two feet high. Nor can I conceive of 
any other place wanting such an accommodation, for 
those who use it are constantly in danger of bursting 
their lungs going up or of breaking their necks coming 
down. 

A biscuit's throw from the foot of the ladder, and 
facing the public gardens, stands the sedate, old-fash- 
ioned house where Napoleon spent the first few nights 
after his arrival on the island. It is a prim, two-story 
residence, the sombreness of its snuff-coloured plaster 
relieved by white stone trimmings and window-sills — 
just such a place, in fact, as the British colonists built 
by the hundreds in our own New England towns. By 
one of the most remarkable coincidences of which I 
have ever heard. Napoleon was given the same bedroom 
which had been occupied by the Duke of Wellington — 
then Sir Arthur Wellesley — on his homeward voyage 
from India only a few years before. 

Leaving Jamestown in its gloomy, rock-walled ra- 
vine, we followed the incredibly rough high-road which 
bumps and jolts and twists and turns and cHmbs back 
and up onto the table-land which forms, as it were, the 
roof of the island. The deeper we penetrated into the 
interior the more luxuriant the vegetation became. The 
dry, barren, soilless, lichen-coated rocks of the coast 

264 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

zone gave way to grassy valleys abloom with English 
gorse and broom and dotted with the bright green of 
willows and the dark green of firs, and these merged, 
in turn, into a land of bamboos and bananas, of oranges 
and lemons and date-palms, where the vegetation was 
so luxuriant and tropical as to give it almost the appear- 
ance of a botanic garden. I know, indeed, of no other 
place in the world where one can pass through three dis- 
tinct zones of vegetation in the course of an hour's 
drive, the first few miles into the interior of Saint 
Helena being, so far as the scenery is concerned, like 
a journey from the rocky, desolate shores of Labrador, 
through the pine forests and fertile farm-lands of New 
England and New York, and so southward into the 
essentially tropical vegetation of lower Florida. 

The road wound on and on, uncovering new beau- 
ties at every turn. Cheerful, low-roofed bungalows 
peeped out at us from gardens ablaze with cameHas, 
fuchsias, and roses; through the vistas formed by fig, 
pear, and guava orchards we caught ghmpses of pros- 
perous-looking stone farm-houses whose thick walls and 
high gables showed that they dated from the Dutch 
occupation; passing above a tiny sylvan valley, our 
driver pointed out the rambHng Balcombe place, where 
the Emperor Hved for some weeks while Longwood was 
being prepared for his occupancy, and in the box- 
bordered gardens of which he made quiet love to his 
host's pretty daughter. In the same valley, not a 
pistol-shot away, are the whitewashed, broad- verandaed 

quarters of the Eastern Telegraph Company's force of 

265 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

operators— tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and a swimming- 
pool set in a lawn of emerald velvet serving to make the 
enforced exile of these young Englishmen, who relay the 
news of the world between Europe and the Cape, a not 
unpleasant one. 

Steeper and steeper became the road; scantier and 
less luxuriant the vegetation, until at last we emerged 
upon a barren, wind-swept table-land. A farm-yard gate 
barred our road, but at the impatient crack of the 
driver's whip a small brown maiden hastened from a 
near-by lodge to open it, curtseying to us prettily as we 
rattled through. Three minutes' drive across a desolate, 
gorse-covered moor, and our driver pulled up sharply 
at a gate in a scraggy privet hedge surrounding just 
such a ramshackle, weather-beaten farm-house as you 
find by the hundreds scattered along the coast of Maine. 
"Longwood," he remarked laconically, pointing with 
his whip. Convinced that I could not have heard 
aright, I asked him over again, for, despite all the ac- 
counts I had read of the mean surroundings amid which 
the Emperor ended his days, I could not bring myself to 
believe that this miserable cottage, with its sunken roof 
and lichen-coated walls, could have sheltered for more 
than half a decade the conqueror of Europe, the master 
of the Tuileries and Fontainebleau and Versailles, the 
man whose troopers had stabled their horses in every 
capital of the Continent. 

Longwood House is an old-fashioned, rambling 
cottage, only one story high, unless you count the 
quarters improvised for the members of the Emperor's 

266 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

suite in the garret, which were lighted by means of 
small windows cut in the shingle roof. The house is 
built in the form of a T, the entrance, which is reached 
by four or five stone steps and a tiny latticed veranda, 
being represented by the bottom of the letter, while the 
dining-room, kitchens, and offices are represented by 
the top. Originally the dwelHng of a peasant farmer, at 
the time Napoleon reached the island it was being used 
as a sort of shooting-box by the lieutenant-governor, 
the present front of the house being hastily added to 
form a reception-room for the Emperor. In addition 
to this salle de reception, where you are asked to sign 
the visitors' book by the old French soldier who is the 
official guardian of the place, there is a drawing-room, 
a dining-room, the Emperor's study, his bedroom, bath, 
and dressing-room — all small, ill-lighted, damp, and 
cheerless. Practically the entire lower floor of the house 
was used by Napoleon, the members of his entourage — 
marshals, ministers, and courtiers, remember, who were 
accustomed to the life of the most brilliant court in 
Europe — being accommodated in tiny, unventilated 
cubby-holes directly under the eaves. With the excep- 
tion of two or three small pier-glasses, the house is 
now quite destitute of furniture, though in other re- 
spects it is kept religiously as it was in Napoleon's 
time, even the faded blue wall-paper, sprinkled with 
golden stars, having been carefully preserved. On the 
walls of the various rooms are notices in French and 
EngHsh indicating the purposes to which they were put 
during the imperial occupancy. Between two windows 

267 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

of the reception-room, where the Emperor's bed was 
removed from his bedroom a few days before his death 
because of the better Hght, stands a marble bust made 
from the cast taken immediately after his death, which, 
barring the one made by Canova during his life, is the 
only likeness of Napoleon admittedly correct. With- 
out the house is the small and unkept garden in which 
the Emperor walked and sometimes worked, the arbour 
under which he spent so many hours, and the cement- 
Hned fish-pond which he built with his own hands. In- 
side or out, there is not one suggestion of colour, of com- 
fort, or of cheer: it is a prison-house and nothing more. 

Near the bottom of the brown and windy hill on 
which Longwood stands is Geranium Valley, which 
contains the tomb, or rather the cenotaph, of the 
Emperor. It was by Napoleon's own wish that his 
body was buried in this exquisite spot, close beside the 
spring at which he so often used to drink and amid the 
wild geraniums of which he was so fond. The famous 
willow-tree still overshadows the little grave-space, 
which is enclosed by a high iron railing and a carefully 
trimmed hedge of box, while masses of flowers give 
brightness to a spot hallowed by many memories, for 
it was in this shady glen that the Emperor passed the 
most peaceful hours of his exile and it was here that he 
rested for twenty years until France brought him back 
in triumph to his final resting-place under the great 
gilt dome of Les Invalides. 

Both Longwood and the grave occupy the peculiar 
position of being French territory in the heart of a 

268 




Longwood House. "This miserable cottage, with its sunken roof and lichen-coated walls, sheltered 
for more than half a decade the conqueror of Europe." 




Looking northward across the Atlantic from Longwood. "To stare out across the wastes of ocean 
from that wind-swept hilltop I travelled twenty thousand miles." 



THE PRISON PLACE OF A GREAT EMPEROR. 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

British colony, for half a century ago Queen Victoria 
presented the property to the French nation, an official 
appointed by the French Government residing on and 
caring for the place and showing it with mingled pride 
and sadness to the few visitors who make their way to 
this one of the world's far corners. It was an interesting 
but gloomy experience, that pilgrimage to the prison 
place of the great Emperor, for it visualised for me, as 
nothing else ever could do, the sordidness, the humilia- 
tions, and the mental tortures which marked the last 
years of Napoleon. As my vessel steamed steadily 
northward across the Atlantic, with the boulevards of 
Paris not three weeks away, I leaned over the taffrail 
and, staring back at the receding cliffs of that grim 
island, I seemed to see the short, stoop-shouldered, gray- 
coated, cock-hatted figure of the Emperor staring wist- 
fully out across those leagues of ocean toward France. 

To locate the next of these "Forgotten Isles," and 
the most completely forgotten of all of them, you had 
better get out the family atlas and, with a ruler and a 
pencil, do a little Morris-chair exploring. Draw a Hne 
due south from Cape Verde, which is the westernmost 
point of Africa, and another line due east from Cape 
San Roque, which is the easternmost point in South 
America, and where those two lines meet, out in the 
wastes of the South Atlantic, you will find a barren rock 
which resembles, as, indeed, it is, an extinct and par- 
tially submerged volcano. This rock, which is con- 
siderably smaller than its sister island of Saint Helena, 

269 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

seven hundred miles away, is officially designated by the 
British Government as H.M.S. "Ascension." Entirely 
under the control and jurisdiction of the Lords Com- 
missioners of the Admiralty, it is unique in that it is 
the only island in the world which has the rating of a 
man-o'-war, being garrisoned, or rather manned, by a 
detachment of sailors and marines, and being adminis- 
tered in every respect as though it were a unit of the 
British navy. With the exception of a dozen acres of 
vegetable garden, there is not a single green thing on 
the island — grass, shrub, or tree. The island of Saint 
Pierre, of which I made mention earlier in this chapter, is 
bad enough, goodness knows, but it at least has a palm- 
tree. Ascension hasn't even that. How they get men 
to go there is altogether beyond my comprehension. If 
I had to take my choice between being sentenced to ex- 
ile on Ascension (which Heaven forbid!) or confinement 
in Sing Sing, I rather think I should choose the prison. 
There are people on Ascension, nevertheless, the popu- 
lation, which consists of officers, seamen, and marines, 
together with a handful of cable operators and a score of 
Kroo boys from Sierra Leone, numbering in all about 
one hundred and thirty. There were also four women — 
relatives of the officers — on the island when I was there. 
They had been there only six months, I was told, yet 
when our vessel arrived not one of them was on speak- 
ing terms with the others. Ascension, is, however, one 
of the most flourishing "match factories" in the Brit- 
ish empire, it being safe to say that any unattached 
female, no matter what her disqualifications, can get a 

270 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

husband in a week's stay on the island. A young Eng- 
Hshman and his bride boarded our boat at Ascension. 
She had been born and had spent all of her life on Saint 
Helena (which is not exactly a roaring metropolis it- 
self), and had married one of the cable operators sta- 
tioned at Ascension, who was taking her on her first 
visit to the outside world. She told me that the event 
of her life, her marriage excepted, had been going out to 
a vessel to see a motor-car which was being transported 
to Cape Town. Here was an educated and intelligent 
Enghsh girl who had come to womanhood without ever 
having seen a railway train, a street-car, a building over 
two stories high, or a crowd of more than five hundred 
people. When we reached Teneriffe, in the Canaries, 
which is about as somnolent a place as any I know, her 
husband took her ashore to see the sights with keen an- 
ticipation. She rode on an electric car, she took tea 
in a four-story hotel, she attended a moving-picture 
show — and was brought back to the steamer suffering 
from violent hysterics. A week later we reached South- 
ampton, where she was so completely prostrated by the 
roar and bustle of her first city that she had to go to bed 
under medical attention. 

To those British officials and soldiers who are per- 
forming the manifold duties of empire along Africa's 
fever-stricken West Coast, the island of Ascension is a 
godsend, for an excellent sanatorium has been built by 
the government on its highest point, and to it come 
wasted, sunken-cheeked, fever-racked skeletons from all 
parts of that coast of death to build up their strength be- 

271 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

fore going back to their work again. Not only is Ascen- 
sion a coaling, cable, and health station of considerable 
importance, but it is also the chief habitat of the sea- 
turtle, which comes there in thousands between January 
and May, to lay its eggs in the sand. After having seen 
the enormous size these creatures attain, it is almost 
possible to believe some of those fantastic yarns about 
his trained turtles with which Baron de Rougemont set 
Europe gasping a few years back. During the year that 
I visited Ascension more than two hundred turtles were 
captured, ranging in weight from five hundred to eight 
hundred pounds apiece. Four of the monsters, each 
weighing close to half a ton, were put aboard our vessel, 
being sent by the ojQ&cers of the garrison as a gift to his 
Majesty the King. They must have had turtle soup at 
Buckingham Palace for several days in succession after 
those turtles arrived. 

It could not have been long after daybreak when 
a frousy-headed Greek steward awoke me with an in- 
timation that we were off Canea. The evil-smelling 
mixture which was called cojQfee only by courtesy, and 
which was really chicory in disguise, held no attraction 
for me, for, through the port-holes of the dining-saloon 
I could see, rising from a sapphire sea, the green-clad, 
snow-capped mountains of Crete, the island of mythol- 
ogy and massacre. 

Our Httle steamer forged ahead at half-speed and 
the white town kept coming nearer and nearer, until 
we could distinguish the caiques in the harbour, and the 

272 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

queer, narrow houses with their latticed harem windows 
which encircled it, and the white mosque with a palm- 
tree silhouetted against its slender minaret, and even 
the crowd of ebony, tan, and coffee-coloured humanity 
that fought for posts of vantage at the water-stairs. It 
was a picture of sunshine and animation, of vivid colours 
and strange peoples, such as one seldom sees except in 
some gorgeously staged comic opera, and as I surveyed 
it sleepily from the steamer's deck I had a momentary 
feeling that I was only an onlooker at a play and that 
the curtain would go down presently and I should have 
to go out into the drab, prosaic, humdrum world again. 
But even as this was in my mind a gun boomed out 
from a crumbling bastion and five little balls ran up five 
flagstaffs which I had already noticed standing all in a 
row on the uppermost ramparts and had mistaken, 
naturally enough, for some new form of Marconi ap- 
paratus. The five little balls broke out into five flags 
and the morning breeze caught up their folds and held 
them straight out as though for our benefit, so that 
we could make them out quite plainly. Four of them 
were old friends that I had known on many seas — the 
Union Jack and the Tricolour and the Saint Andrew's 
cross of Russia and the red-white-and-green banner of 
Italy — but the fifth flag, which flew somewhat higher 
than the others, was of unfamiliar design; but the blood- 
red square of bunting, traversed by the Greek cross and 
bearing in its upper comer the star of Bethlehem, told 
its own story and I knew it for the flag of Crete. And 
I knew that there was deep significance in the design 

273 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

of that unknown flag and in the position of the four 
familiar ones that flew below it, for they signalled to the 
world that the Turk had been driven out, never to re- 
turn; that Christianity had triumphed over Moham- 
medanism, and that the cross had, indeed, replaced the 
crescent; that the centuries of massacre were now but 
memories; that peace, in the guise of foreign soldiery, 
had, for a time at least, found an abiding-place in Crete; 
and, most significant of all, that the new flag with its 
single star would be upheld, if necessary, by the mighti- 
est array of bayonets and battle-ships in Christendom. 
The island of Crete, which is about the size of 
Porto Rico, not only occupies a very important strate- 
gical position, being nearly equidistant from the coasts 
of Europe, Asia, and Africa, commanding every line of 
communication in the eastern Mediterranean, and be- 
ing within easy striking distance of the Strait of Gi- 
braltar, the Dardanelles, and the Canal, but it is also one 
of the richest agricultural regions in the world, or would 
be if the warring elements among its population would 
permit the rattle of the harvester to replace the rattle 
of the machine-gun. Ever since the Turks wrested the 
island from the Venetians, close on two and a half cen- 
turies ago, its history has been one of corruption, cruelty, 
and massacre. Almost annually, for more than seventy 
years, the island Christians rose in rebellion against 
their Turkish masters, and just as regularly the Turks 
suppressed those rebellions with a severity which turned 
the towns of the island into shambles and its fertile 
farm-lands into a deserted wilderness. The cruelty 

274 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

which coupled the name of Turk with execration in 
Armenia and Macedonia assumed such atrocious forms 
in Crete that finally the great powers were aroused to 
action, and in 1898 the fleets of England, France, Italy, 
and Russia dropped anchor in Suda Bay, the Turkish 
officials were forcibly deported, and a board of admirals 
assumed control of the affairs of the unhappy island. 
After a few months of martial government, during which 
the admirals squabbled continuously among themselves, 
the intervening powers proclaimed the island an autono- 
mous state, subject to the Porte, but paying no tribute, 
and ruled by a high commissioner to be appointed by 
the King of the Hellenes. Though theoretically inde- 
pendent, it was provided that all questions concerning 
the foreign relations of Crete should be determined by 
the representatives of the powers, who would also main- 
tain in the island, for a time at least, an international 
army of occupation. Recent events in the Balkans 
having resulted in bringing about an agitation in Crete 
for annexation to Greece, where a propaganda has long 
been vigorously carried on with that end in view, the 
protecting powers have definitely announced that the 
administration of the island will be continued by the 
"constituted authorities" (this should read "self-consti- 
tuted") until the question can be settled with the con- 
sent of Turkey. As things stand at present, the with- 
drawal of the international troops from Crete is about 
as distant as the withdrawal of the British garrisons 
from Egypt. To tell the truth, each of the protect- 
ing powers is exceedingly anxious to get the island for 

27s 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

itself — England because it forms an admirable half- 
way house between Gibraltar and the Canal; France 
because its occupation would carry French influence 
into the eastern end of the Mediterranean; Italy be- 
cause it would serve as a connecting link between the 
peninsula and Tripolitania; and Russia because it would 
give her the command of the entrance to the Darda- 
nelles — and hence, though they will certainly never re- 
store it to Turkey, they are far from anxious to hand it 
over to Greece, to whom, after all, it belongs historically, 
geographically, and ethnologically. As a result, the 
Cretan question will probably disturb the chancelleries 
of Europe for some years to come. 

As I strained my eyes across the sparkling waters 
in vain search for signs of a hotel and breakfast, a boat 
flying the port-captain's flag and manned by gendarmes 
— splendid, muscular fellows with high boots and bare 
knees and baggy Turkish trousers, their keen brown 
faces peering out from under their fluttering cap-covers 
— came racing out from shore. As it came alongside 
the crew tossed oars with aU the smartness of man-o'- 
war's-men; the white-clad ofiicer in the stern, who was 
very stout and very stiffly starched, climbed the stairs 
gingerly, as though fearful of injuring the faultless 
crease in his hnen trousers, and, after the exchange of 
ceremonious bows and laboured compliments in French, 
informed me that the High Commissioner had placed 
the boat at my disposal. There is always something 
pecuHarly satisfying to the soul about going ashore un- 
der official auspices, not only because of the envious 

276 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

glances of your fellow-passengers who line the rail, but 
because of the powerlessness of the customs ofi&cials to 
annoy you. 

Canea, which is the seat of government, is the most 
picturesquely cosmopolitan place west of Suez. It has 
a mild and equable climate; living is cheap and reason- 
ably good; there is a large garrison of foreign soldiery; 
there are no extradition treaties in force; and trouble 
of one kind or another is always brewing. Like a 
magnet, therefore, Canea has attracted the scum and 
offscourings of all the Levant — needy soldiers of fortune, 
professional revolution-makers, smooth-spoken gamblers 
and confidence men, rouged and powdered women of 
easy virtue from east and west, Egyptian donkey-boys, 
out-at-elbows dragomans who speak a score of tongues 
and hail from goodness knows where — all that rabble of 
the needy, the adventurous, and the desperate which 
follow the armies of occupation and are always to be 
found on the fringe of civilisation. 

The foreign troops are quartered for the most part 
on the massive Venetian ramparts which still surround 
the town, but all business centres along the narrow, 
stone-paved quay bordering the harbour, and in a 
straggling thoroughfare which, leaving the water-front 
through a fine old gate still bearing the carven Hon of 
Saint Mark, serves as the vertebra for an amazing tangle 
of dim alleys and deafening bazaars, in which all the 
products of the Levant are bought and sold amid inde- 
scribable confusion. 

Canea is at its best at sunset, for it is not until 
277 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

then that the town awakens to Hfe. As the sun begins 
to sink behind the Aspra Vouna, the streets, hitherto 
deserted, become thronged as though by magic; the 
spaces before the cafes are packed with coffee-drinking, 
nargileh-smoking humanity of all shades and of all 
religions; the soldiers begin to appear in groups of twos 
and threes and fours; the clerks in the shipping-offices 
put on white drill jackets, and sit in chairs tipped back 
against their doors, and drink from tall, thin glasses with 
ice tinkhng in them, and the muezzin, brazen-throated, 
appears on the balcony of his minaret, reminding one 
for all the world of a Swiss cuckoo-clock as he pops 
out to chant his interminable call to prayer: "Allahu 
il Allahu! Allahu Akbar! God is most great! Come 
to prayer! There is no God but Allah! He giveth life 
and dieth not! Your sins are great; greater is Allah's 
mercy! I extol his perfections! Allahu il Allahu! 
AUahu Akbar!" 

It is such a scene as one marks with the white mile- 
stone of remembrance that he may go back to it in mem- 
ory in after years. Picture, if you can, a stone-paved 
promenade bordering a U-shaped harbour. In the 
harbour are many craft — all small ones, for it is too 
shallow for the great steamers to enter. There are 
caiques with sails of orange, of scarlet, and of yellow; 
schooners, grain-laden, from Egypt and Turkey and 
Greece; fishing-boats with rakish lateen-sails and great 
goggle eyes painted at their bows to ward off the evil eye, 
and, so the sailors will tell you, to detect the fish. And 
along the quayside, where the human stream wanders 

278 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

restlessly, there are Greeks in tufted shoes and snowy 
fustanellas that make them look like ballet-dancers; 
swarthy Turks in scarlet sashes and scarlet fezes, wear- 
ing the unsightly trousers peculiar to their race; bare- 
kneed Cretan highlanders, descendants in form and 
feature of the ancient Greeks, swaggering along with 
insolent grace in their braided, sleeveless jackets and 
high boots of yellow, untanned leather; Algerians in 
graceful flowing burnooses and Egyptians with tar- 
booshes and Arabs with turbans — now and then a 
moUah with scornful, intolerant eyes and the green 
turban which marks the wearer as a descendant of the 
Prophet — and brawny, coal-black negroes from Tripoli, 
from Nubia, and from the Sudan. 

And then there are the soldiers: British Tommies, 
smart even in khaki, boots shining, buckles shining, faces 
shining, swaggering along this Cretan street and flour- 
ishing their absurd little canes precisely as their fellows 
are doing all over the globe; French colonials, swathed 
in blue puttees from ankle to knee and in red cummer- 
bunds from hip to chest, their misery completed by 
mushroom helmets so large that nothing can be seen of 
the wearer but his chin; chattering ItaHan hersaglieri, 
who strut about in cocks' feathers and crimson facings 
when at home in the Corso or the Toledo or the Via 
Vittorio Emmanuele, but out here must needs content 
their vanity with white Hnen uniforms and green hackle 
in their helmets; sad-faced Russians, uniformed as 
they would be in summer in Saint Petersburg or Mos- 
cow, flat white caps, belted white smocks, trousers 

279 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

tucked in boots, their good-humoured, ignorant faces 
stamped with all the signs of homesickness, for their 
thoughts are far away in some squalid tenement in the 
poor quarter of Warsaw perhaps, or in a peasant's cabin 
beside the head- waters of the Volga. 

Though Canea is the seat of government, Candia — 
or Heraklian, the classic name by which the Greeks pre- 
fer to call it — ^is the largest and most important town 
on the island. Disregarding the advice of friends, I 
went from Canea to Candia on a Greek coasting steamer. 
No one ever takes a first-class passage on a Greek boat, 
for the second and third class passengers invariably 
come aft and stay there, despite the commands and 
entreaties of the purser, so a third-class ticket answers 
quite as well as a first. Fortunately — or unfortunately, 
as you choose to regard it — I had as fellow voyagers 
a company of British infantry, which was being trans- 
ferred to Candia after three years' service in the west- 
ern end of the island. The soldiers, who had managed 
to smuggle aboard a considerable quantity of rum, 
quickly got beyond the control of the boy lieutenant, 
just out of Sandhurst, who was in command, and who, 
appreciating that discretion is the better part of valour, 
especially where a hundred drunken soldiers are con- 
cerned, wisely left them to their own boisterous devices 
and retreated with me to the captain's quarters on the 
bridge, where we remained until we sighted Candia's 
harbour lights and our anchor rumbled down inside the 
breakwater. 

Were it not for the massive Venetian walls which 
280 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

surround it, Candia would have almost the appearance 
of an Indian town, the similarity being increased by its 
dark-faced, gaily dressed inhabitants and by the British 
soldiers who throng its streets. A single broad, stone- 
paved thoroughfare, lined in places with shade-trees and 
surprisingly clean, winds like a snake from the harbour 
up the hill, past rows of blackened ruins — ^grim remind- 
ers of the latest insurrection — ^past square after square 
of white-walled, red- tiled houses; through noisy bazaars 
where the turbaned shopkeepers squat patiently in their 
doorways; past unkept marble fountains whose stained 
carvings would make many a museum director envious; 
past mosques with slender, graceful minarets and groups 
of filthy beggars grovelling on their steps for alms; past 
the ornate, twin-domed Greek cathedral, and so on to 
the ramparts where the British garrison is quartered in 
yellow barracks that overlook the sea. 

But the real Crete is no more to be judged from 
glimpses of Canea and Candia than America could be 
judged by visiting New York and Chicago. It is in the 
picturesque mountain villages of the Sphakiote range 
that the genuine, untamed, unmixed fighting Cretan is 
to be found, for these dwellers on the slopes of Mount 
Ida, alone of all the scattered branches of the great 
Hellenic family, have preserved in form and feature 
the splendid physical characteristics of the ancient 
Greeks. With the Governor of Candia for my guide, 
the mountain village of Archanais as our destination, 
and with an escort of gendarmerie clattering at our 
heels, we set out from Candia one morning before the 

281 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

sun was over the walls, for we had forty miles of hard 
riding between us and dinner, and roads in the Spha- 
kiote country often consist of nothing more than dried- 
up water-courses. For the first few miles the road was 
crowded with peasantry bringing their produce to mar- 
ket — droves of donkeys, wine-skin-laden; long strings 
of the sturdy, shaggy native ponies tethered head to 
tail and tail to head, their panniers filled with purple figs 
or new-dug potatoes; sullen-eyed Turks driving rude 
native carts, their women-folk veiled to the eyes and 
hiding even them in the presence of the giaours; chatter- 
ing Greeks with homespun rugs or bundles of the heavy 
native lace; now and then a prosperous farmer, strid- 
ing along with a peculiar rolling walk, due to the round- 
soled boots affected by the islanders, carrying a measure 
of potatoes or perhaps a pair of fowls in the baggy seat 
of his enormous trousers. We passed a grass-grown 
Turkish cemetery where the gilded tombstones, capped 
by carven fezes or turbans in the case of men, and shells 
in that of women, blazed in the morning sunlight, while, 
a Httle farther on, we halted for a few moments before 
the tomb of a revered sheikh, almost hidden by the bits 
of cloth which the passing faithful had torn from their 
garments and tied to it. 

Some half a dozen miles inland from Candia lie 
the ruins of Kjiossos, the one-time palace of King Minos, 
a powerful monarch of the Mycenaean age who is sup- 
posed to have ruled in Crete during that hazy era when 
mythology ended and history began. The audience 
chamber and the royal throne, which were old when the 

282 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

Pyramids were built, are still in a perfect state of pres- 
ervation, though these amazing evidences of prehis- 
toric grandeur are no more interesting than the mar- 
vellous network of cellars and subterranean passages 
which underhe the palace, many of them still lined, just 
as they were five thousand years ago, with row upon row 
of mammoth earthen jars for the storage of grain, of 
olives, and of wine in time of famine or siege. Many 
eminent archaeologists, by the way, maintain that it 
was from this bewildering maze of corridors and pas- 
sage-ways that the legend of the Minotaur and the 
labyrinth, the scene of which was laid in Crete, arose. 
Were Crete as easy of access as Egypt, these ruins of 
Knossos would long since have taken rank with those 
which dot the banks of the Upper Nile. 

Half a dozen hours of riding over an open, sun- 
baked country and later through gloomy pine woods 
and mountain defiles, with an occasional halt at a way- 
side xenodocheion that the troopers of our escort might 
refresh themselves with that nauseous-tasting fermenta- 
tion of rice known as arrack, which is the national drink 
of Greece, brought us at last, hot, saddle-worn, and 
weary, into the village square of Archanais. The de- 
march of the town, with a dozen or so of the insurrec- 
tionist chieftains from the surrounding mountains, 
awaited our coming beneath a hoary plane-tree that 
shaded half the village square. Seats were placed for 
us beneath its grateful shade, and, with the ceremony 
of which the Greeks are so fond, we were served with 
small cups of Turkish coffee and with the inevitable 

283 



THE LAST FRONTIER 

loukoum, which is a candy resembUng "Turkish de- 
Hght. " This formal welcome, which no Cretan ever 
neglects, completed, we were escorted to the house of 
the demarch, with whom we were to dine. It was a 
long, low-roofed, homelike dwelling, red tiles above and 
white plaster beneath, and surrounding it a garden 
ablaze with flowers. Met at the door by a servant with 
a pitcher of chased brass, we proceeded to wash in the 
open air, the domestic pouring the water over our hands 
in a steady stream, according to the Cretan fashion. 

The dinner was beyond description. From a Cre- 
tan standpoint it was doubtless a feast for the gods. 
I, being ravenous with hunger, asked not the names 
of the strange dishes, but enjoyed everything that was 
set before me as only a hungry man can. The meal 
began with ripe olives and spiced meat chopped up with 
wheat grains and wrapped in mulberry leaves; it passed 
on through a course that resembled fried egg-plant but 
wasn't; through duck, stuffed with rice and oKves and 
cooked in oil, and a pudding that tasted as though it 
had been flavoured with eau de cologne, concluding with 
small native melons, which I have never seen equalled 
for flavour except in Turkestan, and, of course, coffee 
and cigarettes. The meal lasted something over three 
hours, and then, sitting cross-legged on the divan which 
ran entirely around the room, the whole party dropped 
one by one to sleep. The one recollection of Archanais 
which will always remain with me is that of a roomful 
of swarthy-faced, black-moustached, baggy-trousered, 
armed- to- the- teeth, overfed men, notorious revolution- 

284 



THE FORGOTTEN ISLES 

ists every one, all sound asleep and all snoring like 
steam-engines. 

That night we rode down the mountains in the 
moonlight, the snow-capped peaks looming luridly 
against the purple sky. The moonbeams lighted up 
the ruined farmsteads which we passed and played fit- 
fully among the gnaried branches of the ancient olive- 
trees, giving to the silent land an aspect of unutterable 
peace. The whole world seemed sleeping and the hoofs 
of our horses rang loudly against the stones. The road 
which had been white with dust in the morning was 
a ribbon of silver now; the stately palm-trees sdrred 
ever so gently in the night breeze; the ruins of ancient 
Knossos grew larger in the moonlight until all its an- 
cient glory seemed restored; the crosses on the Greek 
cathedral and the crescents on the slender minarets 
seemed to raise themselves in harmony like fingers 
pointing toward heaven; the great guns that frowned 
from the ramparts were hidden in the shadows— all was 
silence, beauty, infinite peace, until, as we walked our 
tired horses slowly across the creaking drawbridge into 
the city, a helmeted figure stepped from the shadow 
of the walls, a rifle flashed in the moonhght, and a harsh 
voice challenged: 

"Halt! Who goes there?" 



28s 



INDEX 



Abbas Hilmi II, 112. 

Abyssinia, 10. 

Africanders, 226. 

Agriculture in: French Africa, 24; 

German Africa, iSi; Morocco, 32; 

Rhodesia, 214; South Africa, 234; 

the Sudan, 128; Tripohtania, 

. 85-86. 
Ahaggar (Sahara), 24. 
Alexandria, bombardment of, in. 
Algeria, 3, 9, 14, 16. 
Algerian hinterland, 57. 
Algiers, 10. 
Americans in: Rhodesia, 217-8; the 

Transvaal, 237. 
Anglo-German secret treaty, 178-9. 
Angola, 177-8. 
Antanarivo, 9. 
Arab: justice, 75; resistance to 

Italian rule, 98; weddings, 78; 

women, 77. 
Arabi Pasha, no. 
Arabi's rebellion, in. 
Archanais (Crete), 283. 
Artesian wells in the Sahara, 22. 
Ascension Island, 269. 
Ashantee, 254. 
Assuan dam, 123. 
Atlas Mountains, 31. 
Aujila oases, 88. 

Bagirmi, 100. 
Barbary Coast, 8. 
Barka (Tripolitania), 87. 
Barnato, Barney, 243. 
Barotseland, 196. 

Beira (Port. East Africa), 206 et seq. 
Beit, Alfred, 193. 

Belgian Congo, 176-7; communica- 
tions in, 187; reversion of, 177. 
Benghazi (Tripolitania), 84, 87. 
Berbers, 36. 



Bey of Tunis, 64. 

Big game in Rhodesia, 196. 

Biskra (Algeria), 60. 

"Blue tongue," 232. 

Boers, 226. 

Bornu, 100. 

Botha, General Louis, 233 et seq. 

Bridge over the Zambezi, 194. 

British in: Egypt, in et seq.; 

South Africa, 223 et seq. 
British South Africa Company, 212. 
Broken Hill (Rhodesia), 194. 
Bulawayo (Rhodesia), 190. 
Bwana M'kubwa (Rhodesia), 194. 

Candia (Crete), 280 et seq. 
Canea (Crete), 272 ei seq. 
Cannibalism, 253. 

" Cape-to-Cairo " Railway, 190 et seq. 
Cape Town, 203, 227. 
Capitulations, privileges conferred 

by Ottoman, 113. 
Caravans, 17, 19, 91. 
Ceuta (Morocco), 47. 
Chartered companies, 212. 
Colomb-Bechar (Morocco), 8. 
Colour problem in South Africa, 

226-8. 
Consuls, powers of, in Egypt, 114 

et seq. 
Cost of living in Rhodesia, 217. 
Cotton culture in: Egypt, 124; the 

Sudan, 142. 
Country clubs, beneficial effects of, 

in Rhodesia, 216. 
Crete, 2y2 et seq.; administration of, 

275; foreign troops in, 279-280; 

hospitality in, 2S3-4; insurrec- 
tions in, 274. 
Crime in South Africa, 229. 
Crispi, 92. 
Cromer, Lord, 117. 



287 



INDEX 



Cullinan, "The Great," diamond, 

239- 
Cyrenaica, 87. 

Dahomey, 4, 9, 25. 
Dakar (Senegal), 11, 53. 
Dam at Assuan, 202. 
Dancing girls, 58 et seq. 
Dar-es-Salam (German East Africa), 

18s. 
DeBeers syndicate, formation of, 

243- 

Delta of the Nile, 124. 

Dema, capture of, by Americans, 83. 

Desert: reclamation, 21; transporta- 
tion, 23. 

Diamond: fields at Kimberley, 242; 
mining, 234 et seq. 

Dining-cars on " Cape-to-Cairo " 
Ry,, 219. 

Dir6-Dawah (Abyssinia), 10. 

Divorce: court in Tunis, 71; in Al- 
geria, 70. 

Djibouti (French Somali Coast), 9. 

Drainage project in Eg3T)t, 124. 

Dutch in South Africa, 224. 

Eaton's, Gen. William, capture of 
Derna, 83. 

Education in French Africa, 6. 

Egypt, 108 et seq.; army, 118; edu- 
cation, 120; future of, 141; govern- 
ment, III et seq.; irrigation, 122; 
justice, 113, 116; Khedive, 112, 
116, 117, 124; land values in, 121. 

Egyptian Debt Commission, 112. 

El Araish (Morocco), 48. 

England's desire for railway zone in 
German Africa, 198. 

Execution in Tunis, 65. 

Fantasias, 16. 

Fashoda: see Kodak. 

Fevers in East Africa, 152. 

Fez (Morocco), 9. 

Fezzan (Tripoli tania), 84, 86. 

Flowers in Morocco, 33. 

Foreign Legion, 15. 

France's African army, 12-14. 



Franco-Spanish treaty, 46. 

French: Africa, i et seq.; colonial ex- 
pansion, I et seq.; Congo (see 
French Equatorial Africa) ; Equa- 
torial Africa, 4; Guinea, 4, 9; 
Sahara, 5 ; Somali Coast, s ; sphere 
of influence, 2 et seq.; steamers, 11; 
treatment of natives, 16, 42, 75. 

German Africa, 165 et seq.; climate 
of, 180; railways in, 179. 

German colonial expansion, 166; 
desire for the Congo, 176 et seq.; 
desire for Zanzibar, 164; East 
Africa, 175, 185-6; trade of, 186; 
interests in Morocco, 172. 

German militarism in Africa, 182, 
186; overseas banks, 168-170; 
treatment of the natives, 182-4; 
Southwest Africa, 175. 

Germany's foreign policy, 17 1-2; 
oversea interests, 170. 

Golf in Zanzibar, 149. 

Gordon, General Charles George, 
203. 

Gordon Memorial College at Khar- 
toum, 140. 

Great Bend of the Niger, 9. 

"Groote Schuur," the home of Cecil 
Rhodes, 223. 

Guano islands, 257. 

Harbours: in French West Africa, 

10; in German Southwest Africa, 

188. 
Harems, life in, 69 et seq. 
Hay's, Sir John Drummond, speech 

to Sultan of Morocco, 44. 
Heraklian. (See Candia.) 
Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael, and Cecil 

Rhodes, 192. 

Illicit diamond buying, 244. 
Irrigation in: Egj^t, 122; French 

North Africa, 21; South Africa, 

233; Sudan, 21, 128. 
Ismail Pasha, 108 et seq. 
Italy in Africa, 80 et seq. 
Ivory Coast, 4, 9. 



288 



INDEX 



Ivory:, market in Zanzibar, 153; Livingstone, David, finding of, by 
trade, 153 et seq. Stanley, 151. 

Livingstone's discovery of Victoria 

Falls, 210. 

Lobenguela, 211. 

Lobito Bay Railway, 179, 201. 

"Longwood," residence of Napo- 
leon, 266. 

Lualaba River, 187. 

Liideritz Bay (German Southwest 
Africa), 188. 



Jamestown (Saint Helena), 262-4, 
Jimini (Ivory Coast), 9. 
Jof (Sahara), 99 et seq. 
Johannesburg, 203, 235 et seq. 

Kabyle marriage customs, 68. 
Kabyles, the, 65 et seq.; sale of their 

daughters by, 66. 
Kabylia (Algeria), 65. 
Kamerun, 173-6. 
Kamerun, New, 173-6. 
Kanem (French Sudan), 5, 9, 100. 
Kangas, 154. 
Karroo, the, 233. 
Katanga District (Belgian Congo), 

195-6. 
Keetmanshoop (German Southwest 

Africa), 188. 
Khalifa, the, 20, 197. 
Khartoum, 138 et seq. 
King Assibi of the Gold Coast, 254. 
King Kabanga of Uganda, 254. 
King Minos of Crete, 282. 
King Prempeh of Ashantee, 254 

et seq. 
Kitchener, Lord, of Khartoum, 112, 

118. 
Knossos, ruins of, 282. 
Kodok (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 

20. 
Kosti (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 198. 
Kourassa (French Guinea), 9. 
Kriiger, President Paul, 238. 
Kufra Oases, 88, 99. 
Kumasi (Ashantee), 254. 



for. 



Rhodesia, 



Labor, demand 

218. 
Lake No, 137. 
Lake Tanganyika, 187. 
Lake Tchad, 9. 
Language problem in South Africa. 

224. 
Laraiche. (See El Araish.) 
Liberia, 3. 
Libya, 80 ci seq. 



Madagascar, 5, 9, 12. 
Mah6 (Seychelles), 248 et seq. 
Majunga (Madagascar), 9. 
Mannesmann Brothers in Morocco, 

173- 
Marchand, Major, and the Fashoda 

incident, 20. 
Marrakesh (Morocco), 30. 
Mashonaland, 209. 
Matabeleland, 190. 
Mauresque women, 67-69. 
Mauritania, 4. 
Meharistes, 18. 
Melilla (Morocco), 47. 
Meroe, Island of (Anglo-Egyptian 

Sudan), 138. 
Mineral resources of South Africa, 

234- 
Mohammedanism, spread of, in 

Africa, 95 et seq. 
Moorish character, 38. 
Moors, the, 36. 
Morals of Europeans in East Africa, 

157- 
Morocco, 2y et seq.; agriculture, 32; 

climate, ^5; flowers, 33; future 

of, 41, 54; natural resources, 34; 

railways projected in, 52; slavery 

in, 51; travel in, difficulties of, 35. 
Morocco City. (Sec Marrakesh.) 
Morocco-Equatoria Convention, 165. 
Mount Ida (Crete), 281. 
Mozambique, 178. 
Mulai-abd-cl-Hafid, ex-Sultan of 

Morocco, 28. 
Mulai Youssef, Sultan of Morocco, 

41. 



289 



INDEX 



Napoleon's exile on Saint Helena, 
259 et seq. 

Natal, 234. 

Native: labor in South African 
mines, 243; troops in French 
Africa, 13. 

Natives: treatment of Rhodesian, 
218; treatment of South African, 
229. . 

New Kamerun, 5, 173-6. 

Nikki (Dahomey), 9. 

Nile, the, 122; as agent of pros- 
perity, 21; plan to divert the, 20. 

Oases, Saharan, 24. 

Oasis of: Kaouer, 24; Kufra, 88, 99; 
Jof, 99 et seq.; Tuat, 52. 

Omdurman (Anglo -Egyptian Su- 
dan), 126. 

Orange River Free State, 224. 

Otavi District (German Southwest 
Africa), 188. 

Ouled-Nalls, 56 et seq. 

Papal assistance to Italy in taking 

of Tripolitania, 92. 
Parliament of Union of South 

Africa, 227. 
Port Florence (British East Africa), 

200. 
Portugal in Africa, 177. 
Portuguese East Africa, 178. 
Premier Diamond Mine, 239. 
Pretoria (Transvaal), 238. 

Race problem in South Africa, 225. 

Railway: "Afro," 52, 179; "Cape- 
to-Cairo," igoetseq.; LobitoBay, 
179, 201; Otavi, 188; Uganda, 
200. 

Railways in: Abyssinia, 10; Al- 
geria, 8; Central Africa, 190; 
French Africa, 8; German Africa, 
179; Morocco, 52; Rhodesia, 219; 
the Sahara, 8; the Sudan, 13 1-3; 
West Africa, 9. 

Rand, the, 235. 

Rejaf (Uganda), 137. 

Reunion, 12. 



Rhodes, Cecil John, igo et seq., 211, 
322. 

Rhodes Memorial near Cape Town, 
203. 

Rhodesia, 205 et seq.; agriculture, 
214; climate, 209, 213-4; cost 
of living in, 217; coimtry clubs 
in, 216; future of, 222; govern- 
ment, 212; labour, demand for 
skilled, 217; law and order in, 
214; natives, 218; railways, 219; 
resources, 214. 

Riff, the (Morocco), 46-48. 

Rinderpest, 232. 

Rogers, American adventurer, 151. 

Sahara, 18, 21. 

Saint Helena, 258 et seq. 

Saint Pierre Island, 257. 

Salisbury, Lord, 192. 

Salisbury (Rhodesia), 213. 

Sand storms, 132. 

Sea turtles, 272. 

Sebu River (Morocco), 32. 

Senegal, 4. 

Senegambia, 25. 

Senussi, the sheikh, 99 et seq. 

Senussiyeh, Brotherhood of, 98 
et seq. 

Seychelles, 248 et seq.; climate of, 
251; housekeeping in, 252-3. 

Sharef River (Morocco), 32. 

Sherifian d3masty, 42. 

Slavery in North Africa, 73. 

Sleeping-sickness, 213. 

Sobat River, 20. 

Sokoto (Nigeria), 100. 

South Africa, Union of, 223 et seq.; 
agriculture, 234; colour problem 
in, 226-8; diamond-mining, 234 
et seq.; future of, 246; language 
problem in, 224; mineral re- 
sources of, 234; need of irrigation 
in, 233; race problem in, 225; 
treatment of natives in, 228-231, 

Spanish sphere of influence in 
Morocco, 46. 

Sphakiote Mountains (Crete), 281. 

Stanley, Henry M., 151, 211. 



290 



INDEX 



Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian, 126 
et seq.; agriculture, 128; future 
of, 141; government, 127; rail- 
ways, 131-3. 

Sudd, the, 137. 

Suez Canal, 141. 

Sultan of Morocco, 41. 

Sultan of Turkey, 96. 

Sultan of Zanzibar, 160 el seq. 

Sus, the (Morocco), 46, 49. 

Swahili: language, 156; race, 154. 

Swakopmund (German Southwest 
Africa), 18S, 200. 

Table Moimtain (Cape of Good 

Hope), 203. 
Tamatave (Madagascar), 9. 
Tangier (Morocco), 10, 43, 54. 
Teneriffe (Canary Islands), 271. 
Tewfik Pasha, no. 
Tibesti (Sahara), 24. 
Timbuktu (Upper Senegal - Niger 

Territories), 8, 9, 53. 
Tippoo Tib, 151. 
Tobruk (Tripolitania), 87. 
Togoland, 175. 

Tortoise shell from Saint Pierre, 257. 
Transvaal, 235. 
Treatment of women in North 

Africa, 74-79. 
Tripoli (Tripolitania), 84-89. 
Tripolitania, 80 et seq.; future of, 88, 

105; trade of, 91. 
Tsetse-fly, 208, 213. 
Tuaregs, 99. 
Tuat (Sahara), 52. 



Tunisia, 3. 
Tunisian justice, 64. 
Tunisian perfumery, 67. 
Turkish Sultan's influence in Africa, 
96. 

Uganda Railway, 200. 

Ujda (Morocco), 9. 

Ujiji (German East Africa), 187. 

Umtali (Mashonaland), 209. 

United States in Africa, 82 et seq. 

Upper Senegal-Niger Territories, 4. 

Vasco da Gama, 143. 
Victoria (Seychelles), 254. 
Victoria Falls, 194, 210, 220 et seq. 
Victoria Nyanza, 198, 203. 

Wadai, 5, 9, 100. 

Wady Haifa (Anglo-Egj^tian Su- 
dan), 137. 

Walfish Bay (German Southwest 
Africa), 188. 

Women of North Africa, 56 et seq. 

"Worid's View" (Cape of Good 
Hope), 203. 

Zambezi River, 221. 

Zanzibar, 143 et seq.; climate, 146; 
future of, 163; German desire 
for, 164; hotel accommodation in, 
146-7; ivory market in, 153; 
natives of, 154; Sultan of, 160 ei 
seq.; tropical diseases in, 152. 

Ziban, the (Algerian Sahara), 57. 

Zulus, 229. 



291 




J. 




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